Marta is delighted to announce Imago, an expansive presentation by New York-based artist Isabel Rower. Comprised of seating, tabling, vessels, and paintings, the artist’s new body of work defies and embraces the terminology (applied-, decorative-, and fine-) we have long depended on to categorize artistic output, offering an exhibition that, as its title suggests, emerges from the chrysalis of Rower’s vision, an entity informed and transformed by the imitation and reinterpretation of historical design.

Drawing inspiration from the so-called Garden Room, the frescoed dining room, or triclinium, in the Villa of Livia, the residence of Livia Drusilla, the third wife of Augustus, the founder of the Roman Empire, Rower casts a perimeter around the gallery via twelve paintings realized on antique linens—bedsheets, washcloths, and tablecloths—that enclose the artist’s functional-sculptural work within an evocative boundary. Intimate in their display, they allude to larger, contextualized, environments: moody forests and orchards rendered in the rich greens, browns, and golds of Flemish tapestries, their watery imagery both haunting and sacred. With lush leaves, dark limbs, and luminescent fruit, these treescapes operate through reference and mimicry, inducing a sense of the ancient in the contemporary that is shared by Rower’s ceramic works: each of her vessels and stoneware chairs, throne-like in their hand-built constructions, are easily mistaken for marble or travertine, the intricate patterning and painterly application of their glazes applied as the skins that indicate, once fired, their final stage of development—their imago.

This interest in trompe l'œil, previously explored in Box Works (2024), the artist’s first solo presentation with Marta, extends to the paper pulp tables and seats that Rower has created, a material that feigns stone through its ornate surface treatments and alludes to the papier-mâché furniture and objet d’art that became popular in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Europe. Marbled legs support the scalloped tabletop of Twelve Pointed Cloud while inlaid ribbon and long-stemmed flowers sculpted in epoxy spread across the circular face of Pierian Spring and along the seat backs of Oleander and Loosener of Limbs, Love. In Rower’s hands, the functional becomes poetic, descendants from a lineage of traditions that celebrate the lyric possibilities of every room and place of rest—a belief that wherever our eyes and hands fall, there should exist beauty.

Isabel Rower is an artist living and working in Brooklyn, New York. Rower studied at the Rhode Island School of Design, where she began making work that operates as both sculpture and furniture. She has shown with galleries such as Fairfax Dorn Projects, Alcova Milano, Europa Gallery, and Marta and has been featured in The New York Times, New York Magazine, and Dezeen. Working primarily with clay, Rower utilizes the forms of everyday and often prime objects to explore the transformative properties of material and the elements of nature, blurring the boundaries between practicality and adornment. Her work was recently acquired by SFMOMA, and her dishware works were featured in a recent presentation with her mother, Maria Robledo, at the Hammer Museum in Los Angeles.