Maro Gorky
Maps of Feelings
A supporting exhibition of works on paper
Long & Ryle
12th March – 2nd May 2025
The Thread of Colour, a major show, and celebration of the life and work of Armenian-American artist Maro Gorky (b. New York 1943) will open at Saatchi Gallery, London on 28 March and runs until 13 May 2025. The exhibition features a selection of important oil paintings spanning her career as an artist from the 1980s to the present day. Subject matter includes Gorky's family, the Tuscan home she has lived in with her sculptor husband Matthew Spender since the 1960s, and landscapes from the Sienese countryside and beyond. Gorky studied at the Slade School of Art under Frank Auerbach and began to exhibit her work in the early 1980s with exhibitions in London, Milan, Los Angeles and New York.
This exhibition follows on from Gorky's highly successful 2023 retrospective show at Long & Ryle in London, which celebrated her 80th birthday. The accompanying exhibition Maps of Feelings opens at Long & Ryle from 5th March – 2nd May 2025, and features a selection of Gorky’s works on paper, an important element of her artistic practice.
Dominating the Saatchi Gallery exhibition are two large-scale landscapes, Autumn Vines (2025) and Spring Vines (2025). These ambitious works, only recently completed with the last strokes being added just in time for the show, demonstrate that Maro Gorky, in her eighties, remains as powerful and prolific a painter as she was in her twenties.
Maro Gorky's landscapes are very satisfying to look at. Her stained-glass colour, crisp shapes and compositional majesty instil her syntheses of previous art with the force of an individual intently focused personality. You can't ask much more of art - Roberta Smith, New York Times
In the 80s and 90s Gorky’s personal view of the world was expressed in portraits of people she knew and loved. These works strike a deep note when they reflect upon personal memories, such as Connecticut Wedding (1991) which depicts the marriage of her great-grandmother. In The Etruscans (1991) painted in earthy colours, Gorky emphasises her and her husband’s commitment to their home in Tuscany and the local inhabitants, who have become their lasting friends.
Last Act (1980), exhibited in Gorky's first London exhibition in 1983 at the Wraxall Gallery with Sarah Long, depicts a young girl with her lover. Amidst the Tuscan landscape, she stands in lovingly painted fronds and petals of wildflowers, and the couple gaze outward in an idealised, romantic pose. Gorky has consistently painted her daughters, Saskia and Cosima, along with their friends and families. Over time, the portraits have become more simplified, and a sense of medieval maternity is often referred to in the portraits of her daughters.
Both Gorky's landscapes and portraits suggest a newfound reverence for the sacred, expressed through simplified shapes while maintaining a focus on the Tuscan landscape's formal structure. Discerning influences and derivations in Gorky's work is complex, as her canvases exude powerful emotions and energy. While Gorky references Byzantine icons, Botticelli, and medieval religious art, her art transcends simple categorisation.
The accompanying exhibition Maps of Feelings at Long & Ryle features a selection of Gorky’s works on paper. These luminous landscapes, painted in watercolour or egg tempera (a technique learned from a Greek Orthodox nun), are a response to the countryside surrounding her home, as well as travels in China, Greece, and the Sinai Desert.
A short film made by Gorky’s daughter Cosima Spender, an award-winning film director, producer and writer, will be premiered alongside the Saatchi exhibition. The film explores her mother’s artistic practice and style, delving into her perception of the world and how it translates into her landscapes and portraits. Through Gorky’s own words, the film reveals the artist’s intentions and aspirations behind her life’s work.
About Maro Gorky
Maro Gorky was born in New York in 1943, the eldest daughter of the Armenian / American painter Arshile Gorky, one of the originators of Abstract Expressionism. Growing up surrounded by the heroes of Modernism, her first art tutors – before she had properly learnt to walk – were Andre Breton and Roberto Matta. Her father’s suicide when she was five years old, and the subsequent recognition of his epic legacy for American Art, set Maro Gorky on an artistic voyage that seemed both inborn and eternally restless.
Maro Gorky studied at the Slade School of Art, under Frank Auerbach, where she met her husband Matthew Spender, the sculptor and writer. Over the last 60 years, Gorky and Spender have rebuilt and resided in what was once an old ruin of a farmhouse, in the Tuscan village of San Sano in Avane. This house and the surrounding garden have become as much a creative endeavour as Gorky’s painting. One can distinctly see the impression that Gorky and Spender have left on the landscape. Upon approach to the farmhouse, peacocks wander through a profusion of plants, morning glory clambers over the terraces, and the life-size marble and terracotta sculptures by Spender populate the olive groves. Inside the house, Gorky has frescoed the walls, wardrobe panels and even bathroom tiles with animals, plants and patterns as a lasting imprint of her brush.
Describing the setting of the Tuscan landscape as the inspiration for many of Gorky’s paintings would not accurately convey the deep-seated impact that the landscape has had on her artwork. Rather, it is apparent that Gorky, Spender, the farmhouse and the natural surroundings, through maintaining a constant retrospective dialogue with one another over the years, have grown to become inextricably linked; a feeling that is evocatively manifested in Gorky’s landscapes included this exhibition. From the early-romanticised landscapes of undulating Tuscan hills, they move towards an abstracted discourse on colour and pattern, whilst retaining the vibrancy and warmth of the rural Italian environment.
Gorky's work continues a tradition of an academic training fleshed out by modernism that includes André Derain, Leland Bell and Louisa Matthiasdottir - Roberta Smith, New York Times
In Maro’s own words…
Speaking about how living in Tuscany has inspired her work, Gorky says: “You have to be a city slicker to feel romantic about the countryside, but I am not urban. When I think of the word “home,” I see a lit fire – the hearth. And rats in the granary, peacocks, tortoises and turtledoves, hoopoes, swallows and screaming swifts. The “Tusk” of Tuscany, the hunters yelling “qua, qua, qua”, the dogs out of control and the cars called Cherokee. The secret camera in my wood spying on nocturnal animals, counting those breeders in the dark. Terra di Siena being chomped by mechanical dinosaurs reshaping the hills for vines, the sound of rocks grinding as the landscape is de-boned.”
"It has nothing to do with painting and yet it has everything to do with painting. There is intention, there is composition. Green is a usual colour, so you don’t want it, except for peacocks. Green must be split into its fractions, the components of yellow and blue – and we’re back to Agent Orange. The quiet of the country does not exist. There is no such thing as silence. I feel as if we are as we were a hundred years ago, on the verge of revolution.
“Landscape painting used to signify for me a narrative without a beginning or an end, a visual echo of my thoughts. Then I discovered the desert. Near Mount Ouinat, on the frontier of Libya, Egypt and the Sudan, 500 miles from the nearest Egyptian outpost, I observed that the landscape has been ferociously simplified under the irresistible erosion of wind and sand. Crystals cut like jewels were methodically distributed from under my feet, right up to the horizon. This world without human beings was incredibly peaceful.
“Since that moment I have been trying to simplify my landscapes down to their essential underlying structure. The line becomes a path. Colours are what I perceive when I walk along that path. Shapes, as containers in which to place my emotions. Every now and again, like a crystal in the desert, one touch of absolute precision, that last sharp point of white on the pupil of the eye of a Byzantine hermit, painted with a brush made from a special feather found only in a kingfisher’s thumb.” - Maro Gorky
Notes to Editors
Listings information:
Maro Gorky 2025
The Thread of Colour
28th March - 13th May
Saatchi Gallery
Duke of York's HQ, King's Rd, London SW3 4RY
Monday - Sunday 10am - 6pm
Maro Gorky
Maps of Feelings
12th March – 2nd May
Long and Ryle
4 John Islip Street, London SW1P 4PX
Monday – Friday: 10.00am – 5.30pm
Saturday: by appointment (please email gallery@long-and-ryle)
About Saatchi Gallery
Since 1985, Saatchi Gallery has provided an innovative platform for contemporary art. Exhibitions have presented works by largely unseen young artists, or by international artists whose work has been rarely or never exhibited in the UK. This approach has made the Gallery one of the most recognised names in contemporary art. Since moving to its current 70,000 square feet space in the Duke of York’s Headquarters in Chelsea, London, the Gallery has welcomed over 10 million visitors. The Gallery hosts thousands of school visits annually and has over 6 million followers on social media. In 2019 Saatchi Gallery became a registered charity, beginning a new chapter in its history.
Registered Charity Number: 1182328 | Duke of York's HQ, King's Rd, Chelsea, London SW3 4RY
With special thanks to Katherine Benson, Exhibition Programming Executive, Saatchi Gallery
About Long & Ryle
Long & Ryle was founded in 1988. Over the last thirty-five years, the gallery has built a reputation for introducing distinctive, poetic and resonant contemporary art from established British and International artists, as well as young and emerging talent. Long & Ryle Gallery is situated just behind the Tate Britain, in Westminster, London.
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Nicole Dearden | nicole@sitwelldearden.com | +44 7734 709833
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