Her Cityscapes
“What I want most for my paintings,” Mari said, “is vitality” — and she found in the electric, ever-changing scene below her studio the perfect cognate for her vision. For forty years she worked in a third-floor space on the corner of Broadway and 80th Street, above the old H&H Bagel Shop, across from Zabar’s. She painted the still life, studio interior, figure, and much else, but remained captivated by and regularly drew from the vital street below — the endless swarm of vehicles and people, the changing shops and architecture, the passing seasons. She always insisted that she was only slenderly a perceptual painter. “I invent and re-work what I observe,” she wrote, “in order to find on the canvas a world that, like the New York scene, is filled with energy and flux.” Jed Perl noted that no one had captured so well “the marvelously fractured, collage-like excitement of the Upper West Side.” Mari found the texture and mutability of “her” street inexhaustible.
Mari’s cityscapes register the full force of her exuberant love of color and motion and her intrepid commitment to a painterly figuration counter to so much recent conceptual painting.
Nick Lyons
