LOREN MARKS

Loren Marks (b.1991, Aotearoa New Zealand) is an artist based between Naarm/Melbourne and Tāmaki Makaurau/Auckland. Her paintings unfold as dreamlike visions, where figure and image often emerge and dissolve within process and the shifting materiality of paint.

Marks’ paintings are an intuitive excavation where forms reveal themselves through layered washes of pigment. Figures hover at the edge of recognition, appearing momentarily before dissolving back into the canvas. Rather than depicting specific characters, her works maintain a fluid, ambiguous presence, free from fixed identity.

Marks begins her paintings by pouring thinned pigment onto raw canvas, allowing colour to soak and bleed in a process reminiscent of Helen Frankenthaler’s soak-stain technique. From these fluid fields, she gradually builds and erases, carving out forms that waver between figuration and increasing degrees of abstraction. Recent paintings evoke classical references and am ambiguity of place, as well as suggesting the atmosphere and environments of Post Impressionist painters like Pierre Bonnard, with her abstracted fragments of figures immersed in liminal spaces between interiors and nature.

A graduate of Whitecliffe College of Art and Design, Marks was awarded the institution’s top student award as well as the George Pearce First Year Arts Scholarship (2008). Loren is currently completing her Master of Contemporary Art at Victoria College of Art, University of Melbourne, where she was also a recipient of the Cranbourne Scholarship in Visual Art in 2025.

Recent solo exhibitions include Saudade (2025), and Free Verse (2024), both at Sanderson Contemporary.

Artist Website: lorenmarks.com

Loren is represented in Tāmaki Makaurau Auckland by Sanderson Contemporary