marc freeman: all things being equal
12.02.25 - 08.03.25
Marc Freeman: All things being equal
In an age when the digital and the physical intermingle with increasing ease, Marc Freeman’s latest exhibition, All Things Being Equal, examines the delicate dance between historical iconography and contemporary visual culture. The show dissolves rigid artistic boundaries, offering a space where classical painterly traditions and the aesthetics of algorithmic design meet, forging a landscape in which past and present exist in constant dialogue.
Freeman’s latest body of work treats painting as both an act of excavation and reinvention. He retrieves, dissects, and reconstructs historical references through a distinctly contemporary lens. These compositions shift seamlessly between the digital and the handmade, challenging established hierarchies and collapsing the divide between medium and time. Elements of pixelation, glitch aesthetics, and machine-generated forms intertwine with expressive brushstrokes and careful composition, blurring the line between fleeting digital imagery and the permanence of paint on canvas.
A key reference point here is Frank Stella’s late-career embrace of digital technologies—his evolution from strict minimalism to computationally generated three-dimensional structures serving as an important precedent. Freeman follows a similar trajectory, disrupting linear art-historical narratives by merging abstraction and tradition. His inclusion in Thames & Hudson’s 100 Painters of Tomorrow, as well as his exhibitions in New York and Beijing, position him within a contemporary conversation on materiality and technological mediation. His receipt of the Marten Bequest Traveling Scholarship speaks to the expansiveness of his practice, both in terms of geography and conceptual ambition.
All Things Being Equal resists the temptation to frame tradition and innovation as opposing forces. Instead, it proposes a continuum—one where artistic methodologies evolve and hybridise. In Freeman’s work, painting is neither a nostalgic return nor a futuristic leap; it is an ongoing negotiation with time itself, investigating how images endure, adapt, and assert their presence in an ever-shifting visual world.
