Maro Gorky

The Thread of Colour

MARO GORKY

The Thread of Colour

at the Saatchi Gallery in collaboration with Long & Ryle Gallery

28 March - 13 May 2025

INTRODUCTION

When Maro was five years old, her parents quarrelling in the background, she peered into an Easter Egg made of spun sugar. Therein she saw a perfect world in miniature, complete with an imaginary rainbow. She thought: I want to live there, not here. “My only merit is to have done exactly what I wanted to do when I was five years old. Live in the country, make art, be happy. I look back on myself as a little girl and I think, I’ve done it. I’ve got everything a five-year old wants.”

And what was that? A house off the map, mountains in the distance, hills in the foreground, delicate trees nearby. From every window of the house, for fifty years, Maro has painted these views. The many versions of the same composition have naturally changed over time. The earliest were faithful to the colours of the season, the composition firm, nothing improvised. She was in her twenties, the house was fresh and the garden non-existent. “I used to dream of a corner of the garden. I imagined how it would look, and decades later, there it is. I’m like an Aborigine squatting ritualistically in the shopping mall, dreaming of the path that lies underneath.”

“Like most women, I found that motherhood and children overwhelm art. My paintings were few, distant and floral. My rebirth as a painter coincided with our daughters’ adolescence. On our last summer holiday, us four together on the island of Paros, a nun taught me how to mix egg tempera, the technique she used for painting icons. I use egg tempera a lot, partly because our chickens lay lots of eggs. The memory of that nun is always with me. She was happy with her icons and her chickens, her bare landscape and a litre of red wine a day.”

“In Byzantine icons and mosaics, the flat gold background represents infinity. The figures walk forward, they do not recede. I do not see the shapes in my paintings as flat. I see the canvas as a sail on which I can trace the forms which surround me, like griffins on the sails of Viking explorers.”

Though Maro’s paintings are firmly drawn, they can start with generous brushstrokes that look improvised. The definition comes bit by bit. Where one shape meets another requires endless attention. Sometimes the shapes overcome the drawing, but the drawn line is for her the story.

“When I paint my hand has an itch. It makes a line, but it’s like the Uigeeboard, it’s not a priori, it’s not copying. Whatever you put on the canvas resolves itself as you perfect it. If it turns into something else, then so much the better. There’ll always be the original impulse. It has to do with your own style, a manifestation of your inner soul. It has nothing to do with the outside world.”

“Artists don’t accept the terms on which they are born. That’s what makes them artists. Painters are those who try to fill the gap. Life is not enough. They want an answer from their art: in the peace of line, the excitement of colour and the stimulating smell of turpentine. Extreme feelings can have an effect on a painting, but paintings always end up by creating a balance. Symmetry always wins. It’s a way of getting out of yourself. Pozzuoli Red, egg-yolk and vinegar, genuine turps – it’s all prayer. It doesn’t depend on the climate. It’s also addictive. The lovely smell of pine that hits the nervous system. It makes you happier with time.”

Matthew Spender, February 2025

The Last Act, 1980 oil on canvas

200 × 100 cm

This is a painting of my dear friend Emanuela Stucchi. It’s called ‘The Last act,’ because there she is with her boyfriend, and he’s just about to leave her. He’s looking at us, and he’s a dandy. He’s also a cad. He ended their relationship by fax, which is unforgivable. It was the last act of their relationship. She is just daydreaming about their future life together, little realising that there was to be no future life.

Beirut is burning, 1982 oil on canvas

160 × 120 cm

This is a portrait of my dear friend Zeina Aboukheir. It was painted at a time when Beirut was burning. The civil war filled her with anguish, and for months she took refuge in our house. Zeina was and is a key figure in our lives, for it is through her and her husband Sam that we follow what’s happening in the Middle East. And there she is. The landscape looks as though it’s burning as well. I’ve tried to get this mood into the painting, even though the landscape is Tuscan. Whatever optimism there is in this portrait, lies in her dress.

Adolescence,

1987

Cosima had drunk from Alice in Wonderland’s ‘grow bottle’. That autumn although only 14 she left to go to an English boarding school. England then became where she chose to live. Her little friend was perfectly happy to remain where she was.

oil on canvas

120 × 160 cm

1988

When our children were in their late adolescence, we spent one last summer together on Naxos. We rented rooms in a remote mountain village in the center of the island. It overlooked a prehistoric cemetery where we went for walks among the bumpy graves. These are the precious fields of wheat visible from the hotel window. They are carved between outcrops of Naxos marble, one of the most beautiful marbles in the world, with large crystals like eyes.

Plateau at Naxos,

oil on canvas

120 × 160 cm

The Etruscans, 1991 oil on canvas

150 × 200 cm

This painting was commissioned by Philippe Daverio when he was an art dealer. Later he became the Cultural Assessor of Milan, and after that, a well-known impresario and TV personality. At the time, he wanted to put together a group of artists to exhibit in a gallery he’d just opened. We all lived in Tuscany ‘off the map,’ so he called us ‘The Etruscans.’ We were all supposed to make a group portrait but the others could only paint themselves. The group didn’t last. We were all in our different ways loners. This painting is for me connected with Marie Laurencin’s portrait of Apollinaire and his friends: the frontal poses and one simple earth colour, which is burnt umber.

Olympic, 1991 oil on canvas

110 × 150 cm

Larry Olomofe was our daughter Saskia’s first serious boyfriend. Here is Larry almost naked on a sofa with Matteo, a little Italian boy aged three. It was difficult to keep Matteo in the picture because Larry made faces at him and he’d run away. The composition comes from Manet’s ‘Olympia,’ but there’s also a reference to the Olympic games, for Larry was an athlete. When he played football with this household of breathless artists, he could lie down in the middle of the field and just wait for the ball, and he’d still win.

Connecticut wedding, 1991 oil on canvas

120 × 150 cm

I have an East Coast connection through my American ancestors. This is the wedding of my great-grandmother Clara Marie Barnes. My great-aunt Marion Hosmer is sitting in the middle. She used to have tea with William James, the philosopher of Pragmatism, elder brother of the novelist, Henry. Nathanial Hawthorne once wrote a piece about the sculptor Harriet Hosmer, who is also a distant relative of mine.

I made three versions of this work because they fascinated me, but since then I’ve read a book about the Hosmers and I’ve decided they’re dull. The painting comes from a photograph which is slowly oxidizing on a wall in this house. I think it’s time they faded away.

Saturnia seen from above, 2000 oil on canvas

120 × 162 cm

Saturnia lies near a volcanic spring which has been a spa since ancient times. I used to go there once a year to recover from family life. It is beautiful and the spa was boring, so it was a good place for work.

There are two ways of making lines. The first involves a thin strip of colour, a path between the shapes, a guide. The second involves the meeting of shapes, the vibrant line between the colours. Land and water – the sea’s edge dividing two masses.

This painting is a map. We would crawl up to the village of Saturnia and look down on the surrounding landscape. I analysed how it was an extinct volcano, and it’s been this way ever since the Etruscans. It’s also in the shape of a malva flower, which was one of the Etruscan’s favourite flowers.

Eight Bells, 2001 oil on canvas

120 × 160 cm

Going to the desert in Egypt was an important moment in our lives. I’d always admired Yves Tanguy, and it was wonderful to see these Tanguy shapes, to see how real they were and how brilliant he was at recreating the forms of the desert and the loneliness of the desert, and how the desert really doesn’t need human beings.

In the desert, the wind and the sand carves everything. The shapes that emerge are marvellous. Tanguy lived near us when I was between the age of three and five. We always admired his work, and he was a friend of my father’s. The colour of the apricot sand and the order of the desert, because of the wind blowing, is such that all the stones on the ground are of the same weight and shape. They have been tidied by erosion. And seeing those giant mushrooms made of gypsum, with black fossils inside them, was magical.

100 × 140 cm

Twenty years ago we built an extension to our house using the foundations of an ancient pig sty. A crane is elevating heavy beams to the second floor near a pine tree where at night our seventeen peacocks used to roost. The foundations contained multi-coloured tubes for water and electricity – and air, since we wanted good ventilation. If the painting doesn’t look like a house, it’s because it’s about building one, not the finished thing.

The New Wing, 2002 oil on canvas

Valerio is Cosima’s husband. In their early days, his motorbike represented a former freedom which he didn’t entirely want to abandon. When dressed up to go for a ride, with a helmet, he was like a knight in shining armour. I was thinking of Tamara Lempicka in this painting: her sense of glamour tinged with irony.

Cosima wanted him to sell the bike because she thought it was dangerous. He resisted. The problem was solved by rats, who ate the electrics one winter when it was parked here.

Valerio, 2003 oil on canvas

140 × 100 cm

Cosima pregnant, 2004 oil on canvas

110 × 150 cm

Our daughter Cosima sitting on the loggia of the house in Tuscany where we live, heavily pregnant in the month of August. She’s sitting by an open window but it’s been drastically reduced, for nothing can be allowed to compete with the theme, which is the coming child.

Saskia pregnant, 2005 oil on canvas

110 × 150 cm

Our daughter Saskia gave birth to her second daughter in this house, on her feet, with a midwife to catch the baby. This portrait is about self-confidence. Only women know what it’s like to be pregnant, and this portrait is of a woman, by a woman, and they’re all related, including the invisible girl. It’s the triumph of maternity, via the matriarchy. I don’t think a man would ever dare to paint a pregnant woman in this way, with the vulva bang in the middle of the canvas.

Winter, 2007

oil on canvas

120 × 160 cm

It seems incredible to think of it now, but for centuries the Florentines and the Sienese lived next to each other as mortal enemies. The Sienese still celebrate the Battle of Montaperti, a key moment when in 1260 they defeated a Florentine invasion.

We live on the edge of this ancient rivalry, and Tornano is one of five castles we can see around our house. It is on the other side of the river Arbia, which used to be the frontier. According to Dante, after one battle between the two sides, the Arbia ran red with blood.

Tornano

Nesting Peacocks, 2008 oil on canvas

130 × 100 cm

This describes a traumatic summer when a nesting peahen came back from foraging to find a snake eating her eggs. All the peacocks came to watch this scene. They didn’t interfere. The hen is at the bottom of the canvas, the eggs are in the middle. The snake was large and tan and it had feathery horns. The tail of a peacock hangs from the top of the canvas.

Subsequently we made a cage for the peahen, and this protected her up to a point. One year we found a snake wrapped around the cage. She kept trying, but over the years our peahens were reduced to one. After a fox ate her young chicks, she became suicidal. Then she too disappeared. The male peacocks hung around for another five years but now, thank heavens, our peacock moment is over.

Peacocks II, 2009

Jeffrey Smart, the Australian painter, gave us a pair of peacocks in the early 1990s. They bred happily and after a few years we had seventeen of them. Too many. They loved looking at themselves in the French window, leaving behind mementoes the size of meringues. After scraping at the turds with a mason’s trowel, I had to scrub their ghostly residue with disinfectant. At night they roosted in a big pine tree next to the hen coop. In this picture they are shown in silhouette lit by a rising moon.

Roosting

oil on canvas

70 × 55 cm

Cleopatra, Ondine and Friends, 2013

Cleopatra had invited her two best friends for an Easter holiday, they were charming and curious. They loved visiting churches and and museums.

Ondine felt a bit left out.

oil on canvas

100 × 130 cm

2014

130 × 100 cm

Pink blossom, blue sky and the dark branches of the almond trees. My gardening consists of getting rid of the plants I don’t like in order to make room for the ones I want, most of which are transplanted from the woods and fields nearby. After two hours spent scrabbling away along the flower-beds leaving small heaps of green corpses behind me, I’m struck by the way that gardening and painting work together. The intention is to create order out of chaos, yet it’s exciting when things don’t go as you plan and the medium itself answers back. I look up. The hills around me were carved by farmers centuries ago. They, too, were artists.

Spring,

oil on canvas

Spring Vines, 2025

190 × 250 cm

Forty years ago I painted two medium-sized canvases outdoors, sitting about ten meters from our vineyard. I’d given up wine for a year and the colours were muted. I gave great attentive to the detail and the structure of these canvases.

Last year I started two much larger versions, working indoors from the original paintings and copying them as accurately as I could. They came out very differently, however, maybe because I’m no longer abstemious. You stare at the tangle of tendrils and leaves and imagine that the vines are now in the glass you’re drinking.

oil on canvas

Vines, 2025

Autumn

oil on canvas

190 × 250 cm

MARO GORKY

Maro Gorky was born in New York in 1943, elder daughter of the distinguished American painter of Armenian origin, Arshile Gorky. Her first lessons in painting took place with her father as a child. After her father’s death, Maro Gorky’s family moved to Europe and she went to schools in France, America, Spain, Italy and England.

Gorky took her Baccalauréat at the French Lycée in London in 1960 and then studied at the Slade School of Art in London 1961-1966, where she graduated with a B.A. in Fine Art in 1965. In 1967 she married the artist Matthew Spender and the following year they moved to Italy. They have lived in the Tuscan countryside ever since. They have two daughters, born in the early seventies, and four grandchildren. Gorky began to exhibit her work in the early eighties and has held exhibitions in London, Milan, Venice, Florence, Volterra, Pietrasanta, Carrara and Los Angeles.

EXHIBITIONS

1982 London, The Wraxall Gallery

1986 Passau, Die Galerie am Steinweg

1988 London, The Albemarle Gallery

1989 London, Sarah Long, Art International

1990 Long & Ryle, London

1991 Galleria Daverio, Milan

1992 Long & Ryle, London

1994 Long & Ryle, London

1997 Long & Ryle, London

1999 Carrara, ex Banca d’Italia,

2000 Venezia, Galleria Percorsi d’Arte 90 London, Long & Ryle, Art International Pietrasanta, Chiesa di Sant’Agostino Firenze, Accademia delle Arti del Disegno

2001 Volterra, Logge del Palazzo Pretorio Carrara, Centro Espositivo delle Erbe

2002 London, Long & Ryle, Art International

2003 London, Long & Ryle, Art International

2004 Los Angeles, Silvia Bezdikian Fine Arts

2005 Massa, Castello Malaspina

2006 London, Long & Ryle, Art International New York, Salander-O’Reilly Galleries

2008 Museo Civico Archeologico, Fiesole

2009 London, Long & Ryle, Art International

2012 London, Long & Ryle, Art International

2013 Spineto, Castello a Monte

2015 London, Long & Ryle, Art International

2023 London, Long & Ryle, Art International

2024 Archivio Lante, Bagnaia, Viterbo

2025 London, Saatchi Gallery, Flowers: Flora in Contemporary Art & Culture

London, Long & Ryle, Maps of Feelings

London, Saatchi Gallery, The Thread of Colour

BIBLIOGRAPHY

1989 Raffaele De Grada, ‘Corriere della Sera,’ Milan, 30 April 1989, (review).

1991 Giorgio Soavi, Nove artisti contemporanei appartati in Etruria, Galleria Daverio, Milan, (catalogue essay).

1997 John Russell Taylor, ‘The Times,’ London, 28 April 1997, (review).

1999 Anna Vittoria Laghi, Impronte, Carrara, ex Banca d’Italia, (catalogue essay).

2000 John Russell Taylor, ‘The Times,’ London, 10 May 2000, (review).

Ada Masoero, ‘Il Sole 24 Ore,’ Milan, 30 July 2000, (review).

Giuseppe Cordoni, La poetica del colore, Venezia, Galleria Percorsi d’Arte, (catalogue essay).

Nicola Micieli, ‘Una terra, una casa, due artisti,’ Accademia delle Arti del Disegno, Florence, (catalogue essay).

2001 Patrizia Cavalli, ‘Perché Maro dipinge?’ Volterra, Logge del Palazzo Pretorio, (catalogue essay).

Giandomenico Semeraro, ‘Le forme della luce,’ Volterra, Logge del Palazzo Pretorio, (catalogue essay).

2004 Hunter Drohojowska-Philp, ‘Los Angeles Times,’ 20 December, 2004, (review).

Albert Boime, Maro Gorky: From another place, Silva Bezdikian Fine Art, Los Angeles, (catalogue essay).

Matthew Spender, To Be and to Happen, Silva Bezdikian Fine Art, Los Angeles, (catalogue essay).

2005 Claudio Giumelli, Maro Gorky il fascino discreto del colore, Castello Malaspina, Massa Carrara, (catalogue essay).

Mara Amorevole, ‘La Repubblica,’ 7 August 2005, (review).

2006 Bernardo Bertolucci, ‘To honour Maro Gorky,’ Salander-O’Reilly Galleries, New York, (catalogue preface).

Roberta Smith, ‘Maro Gorky, Paintings,’ ‘New York Times,’ December 29 2006, Salander-O’Reilly Galleries, (review).

48 Long & Ryle London