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The world is a network of connected beings and experiences, and Marina Reiter’s paintings offer to make sense of the patterns, impasses and opportunities we pull from our past and cast into the future. In her crowded, expertly choreographed abstractions, globular forms move into and out of one another’s orbit, marking brief encounters in some places and becoming completely intertwined elsewhere. These trajectories are informed by Reiter’s own experiences, growing up between her hometown of Moscow, New York City and Beijing, moving to Washington D.C. in her early 20’s and now finally settled in New York City. This life trajectory of moves and readjustments every few years has left Reiter especially attuned to the hardships and strengths of lives started, packed up and restarted elsewhere.
Indeed, her colorful, immersive paintings speak to contemporary experiences of a world in which people are more connected than ever, and simultaneously more vulnerable to feelings of alienation than at any preceding epoch. Her gentle, curvilinear shapes evoke human forms, atomic particles and the very make-up of social fabric. Each is carefully shaded and rendered with soft, meticulous brush strokes, evoking strong impressions of depth, lighting and texture. And yet Reiter resists anthropomorphizing these forms, instead casting them into a surreal void, spinning, floating, colliding and bouncing amidst small black lines and shapes, each painting unfolding against soft, blurred backdrops.
The sense of movement and activity, in fact, may be the most striking effect of Reiter’s work. Unlike Joan Miró’s surrealism or Fernand Léger and Piet Mondrian’s abstractions, Reiter depicts a realm of infinite possibility. She strives to create space for movement, ambition and optimism where others prized static, perfectly balanced compositions. Relations between each of her forms and their surroundings are never at a standstill, but in a constant process of renegotiation and redefinition. Remarkably, though, her paintings don’t seem off-kilter or unfinished. Instead, Reiter manages to capture moments of movement, change and tension that are also carefully poised and composed. These elemental scenes depict our world, one that continuously tries to picture itself while it keeps changing.
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