Helen Marden, Grieving in Bright Colors and on Her Own Terms

The grief of losing a partner has been evoked by artists as various as Francis Bacon, with his “Black Triptychs” in the 1970s, and Felix Gonzalez-Torres, whose billboard photograph “Untitled” (1991) lets the absence of figures in an empty bed be a reference for a giant loss.

With “The Grief Paintings,” an exhibition of 23 new works on view through Sept. 14 at the Gagosian gallery on Park Avenue at 75th Street, Helen Marden adds her own entry to the tradition — a painter mourning another painter with works in their shared medium.

The show comes a year after the death of her husband, Brice Marden, who was 84 and ranked among the most influential painters of his generation, earning a Museum of Modern Art retrospective in 2006 and big auction prices for his work. His current record is $30.9 million, set by the signature winding loops and swirls of “Complements,” a vivid diptych, at Christie’s in 2020.

The small, round works by his widow at Gagosian are not in the mourning register of blacks and grays that a viewer may expect. Quite the opposite, though she also chose to include one work by her late husband, the black diptych “Passing” (1970-83).

They are mostly in Helen Marden’s hot palette of reds and oranges, vibrant and shiny, and they have shells, feathers and bits of glass affixed, as if her memories happened to be flying by her and clung fortuitously to the works. Even the black ones have colored feathers attached.

“I have no conscious memory of how I decided to do them,” Marden said of the new works, which she began right before her husband died, completing most of them by the end of 2023. “It was the early grief. You don’t know where you are. I was in shock.”