Hollywood, Los Angeles
Carly Burnell
The Preserver
MariposaMariposa is pleased to present The Preserver, an exhibition of new paintings by Carly Burnell (b. 1991, Santa Barbara, CA). The exhibition marks the artist’s second solo presentation with Mariposa and her first in California—a return to the state where she was born and raised. Over the past fifteen years, Burnell has developed a highly singular mode of object-making that moves quietly and mysteriously between painting, sculpture, and installation. Influenced by the Light and Space movement that emerged in Southern California in the 1960s, her work explores the ways objects can elude, shift, deny, and expand the limits of human perception. Where those artists embraced the smooth, polished materiality made possible by advances in aerospace and engineering, Burnell’s practice instead stages a subtle rebellion—embracing Postminimalism and rematerialization. Burnell departs from the formal rigidity of Minimalism, as exemplified by artists such as Mary Corse and Agnes Martin, instead working with materials that are flexible, plastic, and responsive. From the outset of her process, Burnell foregrounds material interaction, guided by an open-ended commitment to experimentation. Oil, wax, resin, and silicone converge with burlap and linen to form richly textured surfaces that catch and hold light within their peaks and valleys, refract it through varying degrees of transparency, and return it in moments of high reflectivity. The process welcomes the unknown, allowing materials themselves to shape the composition. Her hand remains ever-present—its energy embedded within the media that register each gesture across the surface. In this regard, her practice finds kinship with Eva Hesse, whose work similarly embraced uncertainty and the intangible. In a 1968 statement for her exhibition Chain Polymers, Hesse wrote: “It is my main concern to go beyond what I know and what I can know. The formal principles are understandable and understood. It is the unknown quantity from which and where I want to go. As a thing, an object, it accedes to its non-logical self. In its simplistic stand it achieves its own identity. It is something, it is nothing.” To encounter Burnell’s paintings is to witness materials pushing against their conventional limits, even as they dissolve into new conceptual registers. The medium itself becomes imbued with meaning—an inquiry into perception, and a response to the psychic and emotional experience of inhabiting the world. Questions continue to arise through the act of looking; answers remain transient, while the questions persist. The experience is, ultimately, just that—an experience. Carly Burnell (b. 1991, Santa Barbara, CA) is an artist living and working in New York and Paris, France. She earned her BFA in Fine Arts from Parsons The New School of Design in 2015, followed by an MFA in Studio Art from New York University in 2017. Her solo exhibitions include David Lewis Gallery, NY (2024); Mariposa, Paris (2024); Spencer Brownstone Gallery, NY (2023, 2019); gallery cfcp, Brooklyn (2018); and 80WSE Gallery Project Space, NY (2016). Her work has also been featured in numerous group exhibitions across New York, Los Angeles, Miami, and Nashville. Additionally, she was featured on David Zwirner’s Platform in 2021. Burnell is also a writer and performs with Stanley Love Performance Group.