Marina Kappos is an artist who is not afraid to define, cross and blur borders and boundaries. Her paintings draw you in, as if you could step inside and allow your own figurative lines to become additional layered elements. They convey movement, but are still. At once, they induce calm and invite reflection while calling you to stir. Kappos has a creative approach, style and work ethic that engender culturally universal appeal. Striking in context, texture and color, her works lack affectation and embody her own quiet intellect. She has completed artistic residencies in her native USA, as well as in Tokyo, Paris, and Bodrum, Türkiye.

About her work, Kappos explains: “My paintings depict vibrating women, an optical trick, but one that makes it feel like they are dancing in their confined spaces. Like echoes, the repeated motifs almost have a Doppler effect, where there is an increase or decrease in frequency of light depending on where you stand. The ethereal, transparent layers of paint eventually become portraits sometimes melding into landscape. Ideas of frequency, resonance and connection have evolved in my most recent paintings, inspired by the scientific theory of quantum entanglement, in which there is an invisible link between distant particles that allows one to instantly affect the other. Einstein called this phenomenon “spooky action at a distance”. I can relate to distant particles affecting one another because I have an identical twin sister. I have lived with a seemingly mirror reflection my entire life. My paintings, with their repetitive imagery, buzzing frequency and optical motion, remind us that what we think of as concrete or separate, distinct objects, and even our own bodies, are more fluid than we realize. We are inextricably linked to one another and our surroundings.”

Marina Kappos is represented by SHRINE in New York City

Photo by Lia Larrea | Courtesy of Marina Kappos