Printed Matter is thrilled to announce a three-year edition project with artist Marley Freeman. This print work, no life be hostage of my comfort (2024), translates the layering of transparent and opaque passages of color that characterizes her paintings into the medium of screen printing. Titled after a line from a poem by environmental activist and writer Wendell Berry, the abstract work is a collision of dynamically interwoven forms at once geometric and gestural. Shapes make contact with each other and appear to react, animated and dancing even as they remain fixed in place. Freeman connects her sensitivity to the interaction of color and form and her predilection for layered compositions to her childhood, spent among the antique textiles dealt by her father, and her later experiences archiving and cataloging a library of historical textiles for an American fabric mill. The process of screen printing, common in the production of patterned fabric, expands Freeman’s painting practice by introducing yet another method of layering color and form.

Marley Freeman (b. 1981, Lynn, Massachusetts) uses hand-mixed gesso, acrylic, and oils to create meticulous, psychologically charged color fields. Working primarily in the medium of painting, Freeman studies the ways in which the material “wants to perform,” resulting in multisensorial investigations of color and light that transcend distinctions between abstraction and representation. “Pigments have their own ways of acting,” she says, “and I became obsessed with learning their traits.” Her distinct vocabulary of forms is made up of brushy strokes, color washes, and shapes that freely transform across the picture plane. The influence of the material history of textile production on the artist is evident in her close attention to the textural subtleties of her paints and her reverence for their surface effects. Freeman lives between New York City and Massachusetts.

Freeman’s work can be found in the collections of the Crocker Art Museum, Sacramento, California; Los Angeles County Museum of Art; RISD Museum, Providence, Rhode Island; San Antonio Museum of Art; Whitney Museum of Art, New York; University of Colorado Art Museum, Boulder; and the Hessel Museum of Art, Annandale-On-Hudson, New York.

This print is the first in a three-part serial fundraising edition series. Over the past decade Printed Matter has worked with Wade Guyton (6 editions, 2014-2019) and Jonas Wood (3 editions, 2020-2022)—in which the artists created a series of works that were released annually in succession. The artists used the serial form to produce variations of a single theme that then play out across the series in compelling ways. Serial fundraising editions have become a significant means of support for the many programs and services available through Printed Matter.