Tif Sigfrids is thrilled to present a solo exhibition with Margaux Ogden entitled Tidal Locking. The exhibition will open with a reception on January 13th and remain on view through February 24th. This is the artists first solo exhibition with the gallery.

Tidal Locking is a presentation of new paintings iterating upon each other, as well as the artist’s most recent bodies of work. For several years Ogden’s paintings have shared, as their genesis, a reference to the floor mosaic from a Roman bath that the artist observed during a residency in Rome. What could easily be passed off as a strategy of repetition is more of a dependence that each painting has on its predecessor. Like a slow-moving image, every painting carves out a distinct, but highly referential relationship with each that came before. Small compositional shifts emerge from this shared past, creating a continuity between evolution and return. Illustrating this, semicircular sunlike shapes peek from vertical horizons reminding us of the subtle, underlying presence of a grid.

For Ogden, the substrate of the painting is as important a formal element as the images that lie on top. The weave of the primed canvas reveals every decision the artist makes along the way, imbuing the work with an element of performance. There is no covering up, only a single layer of thin, once-fluid paint, cemented as an image. Bright, nearly psychedelic, straight out of the tube colors contrast with forms reminiscent of the natural world, a landscape turned on its side. The large scale, vertical format of each painting mirrors the artists own body, adding to the complexity of each improvised arrangement.

Margaux Ogden was born in 1983 in Boston, Massachusetts. She received a BA from Bard College in 2005, a Post-Baccalaureate in Fine Arts from Brandeis University in 2010 and an MFA in Painting from Boston University in 2012. She attended the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture in 2011 and was an Abbey Fellow at the British School at Rome in the Fall of 2021. Ogden lives and works in Brooklyn, NY.