Janice Guy, in collaboration with MBnb Project Space in West Harlem, presents a solo exhibition of paintings by Marley Freeman.

Just as memories collide and overlap, and events from years ago weave themselves into the present tense, Marley Freeman’s paintings, small, abstract and gem-like, are an accumulation of layers with varying degrees of opacity and luster. The colors, hand-mixed acrylics or oil paint and slapped onto the canvas at a rapid clip, are anomalous and unexpected, contemporary and vintage in feel. There is a punk-fashion impulse and a sexuality of intuition, a calm elation. The painting licks and spits, desirous of a language that is located within the body, within spatiality, within color, and without definition.

I am speechless in the face of apathetic, dualistic thought patterns. These paintings are acts of resistance to that speechlessness – they long to speak fluidly in a tense that is both historical and forward-looking.

Born in 1981 in Boston, Marley Freeman earned a Bachelor of Fine Arts degree from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and a MFA from Bard College’s Milton Avery School of the Arts. Solo exhibitions include Californienne, Parker Gallery, Los Angeles (2018); Downstairs Projects, Brooklyn, NY (2017); Never Give a Sword to a Man Who Can’t Dance, PSM, Berlin (2017); Decision 2015 (I Change), Cleopatra’s, Brooklyn (2015). Amongst numerous group exhibitions, Marley Freeman’s work was seen in What Ever Moves Between Us Also Moves the World in General curated by Sonel Breslav at Murray Guy, New York (2016).