Marilla Palmer: Ecstatic Earth,Kathryn Markel Fine Arts, New York

Thu 26 Jun 2025 to Fri 1 Aug 2025

179 10th Avenue, NY 10011

Tue-Sat 11am-6pm

Kathryn Markel Fine Arts presents Ecstatic Earth, featuring new paintings by Marilla Palmer. This is her sixth solo exhibition with the gallery.

On this body of work Palmer writes, "Where is Mother Nature? Wondered Goethe. “She is the only artist; arriving, without a trace of effort, at perfection, at the most exact precision, though always veiled under a certain softness.” Working so directly with nature makes it feel like I’m collaborating, but with an unpredictable partner. Who knows what will appear in my studio garden, the forest or in the coral reefs? How will the petals change when pressed or if the wet watercolor, interference paint or sequins will capture the ecstasy of what I see? I find the tiny steps and evanescence of what Goethe called nature’s dance fascinating, even hallucinatory. “We live in her midst and know her not. She is incessantly speaking to us, but betrays not her secret.” wrote Goethe.

Maria Sibylla Merian was determined to uncover nature’s secrets. She believed that insects were having sex and making babies in the ecstatic earth. It seemed like a wild idea at the time, in 1700. She sat in the mud of Surinam and gorgeously documented vibrating life, intimately in minutiae proving her theory. Close observation of what’s growing or flying through my studio garden feels important, urgent, because it’s fleeting. The wind blows in spores and birds drop exotic seeds on the native pollinators. (Who’s native anyway?) Human presence is everywhere on the earth, in the seas and in the sky. So what I do, in my collages, is to create hybrids: nature and artifice. I don’t only document what I see, I respond to the unfathomable beauty of what is with embellishment. Nothing on the earth is pure anymore, our planet is a collage. Technology and travel reveal and make accessible the fabulousness of our planet, but then there’s the famous, Faustian pact.

Purple haze is in my brain, lately things don’t seem the same. Don’t know if it’s day or night. Excuse me while I kiss the sky. A multicolored constantly changing hallucinatory evanescence. Jimi Hendrix ecstatically saw “Butterflies and zebras and moonbeams.” Nature is fluid, euphoric. Hermaphrodite tropical fish flamboyantly change color and shape as they morph from female to male or exist as both, living in the reefs with the hermaphrodite coral and jellyfish bright as miniature neon. But the purple, ochre and black coral is being bleached by pollution. “The tiny island sags downstream, 'Cause the life that lived is dead And the wind screams “Mary””….shred that guitar, Jimi."