Artist: Libbie Mark

Berry Campbell presents Libbie Mark: Abstract Expressionist, focusing on Mark’s “collage paintings” from the 1960s. Working between New York and Provincetown, Mark developed a singular, experimental approach to painting, creating works distinguished by their rich materiality, tactile surfaces, and sophisticated color relationships, merging painterly gesture with collage-based construction, positioning her work within the broader experimental currents of postwar abstraction.

Though largely overlooked during her lifetime, Mark was deeply engaged with the artistic milieu of the postwar New York School. While studying at the Art Students League in the late 1950s, she attended Hans Hofmann’s final Provincetown summer session in 1957, an experience that proved formative to the evolution of her practice. By the early 1960s, Mark had developed her richly textured “collage paintings” that became her signature, combining gestural abstraction with layered surfaces constructed from crumpled paper, pigment, and impasto.

In 1962, Knapik Gallery presented Mark’s first and only solo exhibition during her lifetime, Libbie Mark: Paintings and Collages. In reviews in ARTnews and Manhattan East, critics noted the works’ “color brilliance” and “vividly sensuous response to visual experience,” recognizing Mark’s key balance between spontaneity and control within her compositions. Mark later exhibited with the Vectors group, an important collective of artists active in New York throughout the 1960s.

Today, renewed attention has positioned Mark among a generation of women artists whose contributions to Abstract Expressionism and postwar painting are only now being more fully reconsidered.