Margaux Ogden
Margaux Ogden
Margaux Ogden (b. 1983, Boston, MA) is a Brooklyn-based painter whose abstract works explore memory, repetition, architecture, and the passage of time through vibrant color and intuitive mark-making. Working primarily in acrylic on canvas, she creates compositions that balance geometric structure with spontaneous gesture, drawing inspiration from architecture, ancient mosaics, and the physical act of painting itself. Ogden received a BA from Bard College and an MFA in Painting from Boston University. She has participated in residencies including the British School at Rome, Yaddo, and the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture, and was awarded a Pollock-Krasner Foundation Grant in 2018. Recent solo exhibitions include Introductions at White Cube, online (2024), Tidal Locking at Tif Sigfrids, Athens, Georgia (2024), If You Should Look Back at Deanna Evans Projects, New York (2023), and a solo presentation at Berggruen Gallery, San Francisco (2023). Her work has been featured in publications including BOMB, The Paris Review, Cultured, and Galerie.
Using monotype color flats and hand-hewn stencil shapes, Brooklyn-based artist Margaux Ogden approached her first project with Aurobora as an opportunity to deconstruct her painting practice and to examine the compositional structure, palette, and traditional forms within a new medium.
Through experimentation, Ogden was able to fuzz the borderline between incidental and intentional mark-making. Ogden treated each of these compositions without formal, rigid parameters and instead allowed herself to embrace the unexpected moments that sprang from each run of the printing press—stencil shapes substituted for rendering a subject, strips of tape and razor-blade cut-outs dictated spatial breakdowns of the compositional plane, layering color on top of color determined a final palette.
Over the course of her studio time at Aurobora, the artist searched for that provisional moment where the unfinished, unpredictable quality of her paintings could step out into the foreground in these works on paper. It is as though Ogden’s hand-worked monotypes and her paintings on raw canvas carry on a reflective conversation, as if each seized the opportunity to connect with the interior impulse of the other, to access a different elemental beauty, to achieve a communion.
