2025 New Monoprints: Marie Lorenz, Undertow

Marie Lorenz’s work cannot be defined as a singular practice. Instead, the New York-based artist employs video, ceramics, sculpture, printmaking, performance, and recently, opera, to investigate flotsam, transforming the trash of our everyday lives into a series of artistic gestures.

Since 2005, Lorenz has been running The Tide and Current Taxi, a project where she navigates her own hand-built boats around the harbor of New York City. The trips serve as an inversion of the city, slowing down the experience of the metropolis through the magical exploration of the built environment.

Lorenz is preoccupied with the idea of the contemporary fossil.

The wonder of discovering lost treasures and forgotten sites is prevalent in Lorenz’s practice. The tidal debris found during her tidal taxi rides and other water-based excursions serves as both remnants of our collective impact on our environment and documentation of Lorenz’s particular journeys as she reimagines the refuse, whether through prints or the casting of plastic into porcelain. Land artist Robert Smithson would call these objects a “ruin in reverse,” and indeed, Lorenz is preoccupied with the idea of the contemporary fossil. Rope, pylons, plastic utensils, tampon applicators, plastic bottles—all of these things are markers of our human existence. What Lorenz makes of those markers is to create art that is responsive, expands our notion of place, and transcends its material presence.

During her first visit to Tandem Press, Lorenz created Undertow, a series of monoprints that incorporate the tumbled debris that she so often encounters and collects on her boat trips and her frequent visits to the New York Harbor.

I wanted to create works that captured the elusive moment when flotsam washes up on the beach, in an almost perfect arrangement.

“I wanted to create works that captured the elusive moment when flotsam washes up on the beach, in an almost perfect arrangement,” Lorenz explains. “This process of working [with printed elements in a collage-based way] allowed for the objects to arrive on the page in a fun and loose way. Almost like I stumbled upon them on the beach, as if they were created by the wind and sea.”

The monoprints begin with a background of either screen printed or hand-painted paper. Layered on top are collage elements, individual prints made from trash that Lorenz collected from the shore and brought into the studio. These items are created through a variety of processes, including relief, photo intaglio, and screenprint. The use of modified silkscreen ink and pigmented shellac produces transparent colors of aquamarine, neon green, and a faded pink, referencing how the sun bleached the plastic objects the prints depict. Pops of color appear throughout, mimicking the discovery of brightly colored human-made objects found amidst natural ocean wreckage, such as shells and seaweed.

For Lorenz, the various depicted dreck act as metonyms, substitutes for the real thing. “In the printmaking process, the image remains conjoined with the object it represents,” she explains. The flotsam is immediate and not a representation of another meaning; an indexical mark, pressed from the plate to the page. Instead of imparting a narrative with this work, Lorenz proffers a floating taxonomy of patterns of debris—plastic comb, plastic bottle, plastic straws, foam insulation, driftwood—some longer-lasting than others, but all equally caught up in a beautiful conglomeration of happenstance.

---

Marie Lorenz (b. 1973, lives and works in Brooklyn, NY) roots her work in exploration and narrative. Since 2002, Lorenz has been traveling various urban waterways in boats she designs and builds, collecting the tidal debris that accumulates in the harbor. From these floating vantage points, the artist cultivates new perspectives of otherwise familiar landscapes. Lorenz makes videos and installations that document and respond to the debris and discarded objects she encounters. Through printing, casting, or videotaping, Lorenz attempts “to un-know the metropolis by continually exploring it.” The resulting works act as a visual equivalent of beach-combing and tell the story of the artist’s explorations in “collaboration” with the tide and the connections she forges with her occasional passengers. Recent solo exhibitions include DRIFT TILT, Jack Hanley Gallery, NY; Waterways, Susanne Lemberg Usdan Gallery at Bennington College, Vermont, Tide and Current Taxi, Rib Gallery, Rotterdam. Recent group shows include The Sorcerer’s Burden: Contemporary Art and the Anthropological Turn, The Contemporary, Austin, Texas and Wanderlust, the University of Buffalo Art Gallery, Buffalo, New York. Lorenz is a Fellow of the American Academy in Rome and a 2021 Creative Capital Awardee. She received a B.F.A. from Rhode Island School of Design and an M.F.A. from Yale. She is currently an Associate Professor of Fine Art at the Fashion Institute of Technology.

---

Click here to view all available works by Marie Lorenz