Madelynn Green

 B. 1993 in Milwaukee, USA

Lives and works in London, UK

I was born in Milwaukee in 1993 and moved to London in 2017 to do my MA in Fine Art at Central St. Martins. My practice encompasses painting (oil and acrylic on canvas, board, paper, and wallpaper), drawing (charcoal, graphite, pastel). I am driven by the desire to connect art to society and to make paintings that respond to the world around them. In my paintings, paint bleeds and overlaps, color is amplified, and figures are loosely rendered to foreground the strength of paint as a tool for radical image-making, distinct from the objective camera lens. I try to strike an imaginative balance between abstraction and representation in order to generate new associations.

 My bodies of work always start with questions that I aim to answer through the process of painting and the paintings themselves. My background studying and working in politics influences my practice and inspires my interest in proliferating counter-hegemonic images that challenge power hierarchies.Working from photo and video reference material as well as imagination, my most recent bodies of work have explored mannequins and beauty rituals, mirrors, music, and crowd and family dynamics. While expansive, the series all are connected by an emphasis on the figure, a desire to relate painting to society, and my urge to explore the generative potential of paint. 

I aim for my practice to be broad, synthesizing my ideas and lived experiences. I make paintings in focused series where I draw from my interests  and research.  My 2021 solo exhibition, Heartland, was a meditation on my hometown of Milwaukee, USA. It consisted of smaller scale, red-toned paintings that considered the "heartland" as a geographical, political, and material concept. I experimented with landscape painting and revisited subjects explored in my prior works, like domesticity and portraiture. In my first solo exhibition, Birth of A Star, I explored the concept of stardom in relation to Blackness from the significance of the North Star during the Underground Railroad, to the prevalence of Black stardom in contemporary music and culture. My most recent solo exhibition, Mirror Mirror, explored the concept of ‘meta-painting’ via the mirror motif in both painting history and in my own paintings of domestic scenes, water, and figures.

 My research concerns in my work and teaching include: the relationship between surrealist visual language and political/social/personal upheaval, expressionism and abstraction in European/African/South American/North American global contexts, the political and social contexts of materials and color, the art object’s aura and spirituality in making especially with regard to indigenous art, the “end” of painting and the expanded field, the concept of non-hegemony in  images/objects, the concept of rhythm in relation to the art object, and music/dance in contemporary art. 

I love art because it embodies many disciplines: philosophy, ethics, religion, politics, physics, and language to name a few.  All in all, I aim for my practice to be research-based and dynamic, constantly evolving with me. My goals for the future include expanding my experimentation with painting materials, developing a sculpture practice, doing more art writing, and collaborating with multimedia artists as well as writers. As a painter, I think a lot about what the future of the medium is and how it can adapt to change and change how people see the world.