BASKET BOOKS & ART IS PLEASED TO PRESENT THE RED SHOW, a solo exhibition by Houston-based artist Adam Marnie consisting of a selection of works in sculpture, painting, and photography, variously linked by the color red. The Red Show is on view September 9 – October 15, 2023, with an opening reception on September 9 from 2–5pm.

The isolation and presentation of red courses through modernity, from its use in painting by Malevich, to its association with Nazism, to its glorious subversion in Punk. Overused, if not ineloquent, red has been exploited endlessly in consumer products like Coca-Cola and Marlboro, fast food chains and banks. Marnie’s use of red mines its ubiquity while also making room for its potential as a potent and endless site of exploration. The Red Show stretches out in different directions, and the works—most of which were made over the last month—are immediate, formal and linguistic, making use of material directly at hand. Red, supersaturated and primary, operates as an expressive misnomer or deflecting shield, holding the works together as a group and as an independent current running through and alongside the work.

Many of Marnie’s earlier works were similarly circumscribed by the utilization of various imagistic clichés: the flower, the cube, the rupture. In those works, such tropes were both what the work was physically made of but also always as an open void to let in other, even oppositional, things. Self-prescribed, Marnie’s “red” prompt for this exhibition taps into this stream of thought, starting with the first red works he made over a decade ago. Two of the included works (dating from 2014 and 2018) set the stage. The rest of the works in the show (all 2023) were made in Marnie’s home and backyard at 4225 Gibson Street, where he lives with his wife and child, and runs the gallery and publishing project F.

Adam Marnie (b. 1977, Minneapolis) is an artist, writer, publisher and art dealer living in Houston. His work was included in recent group exhibitions at White Columns, Magenta Plains, and Kerry Schuss Gallery (all New York); / (Slash), San Francisco; Arturo Bandini and Bad Reputation (both Los Angeles). Solo exhibitions of his red work include Recursion, Ellie Rines, 55 Gansevoort, New York (2014), Recursions, Halsey McKay Gallery, East Hampton, NY (2014), and in a presentation with Derek Eller Gallery at the Brussels Art Fair (2013). His two-person collaboration with New York- and Berlin-based artist Aura Rosenberg was included in the Texas Biennial at FotoFest (2021). His book The Origin of Mark Flood, chronicling Flood’s life from 1987­–1992, was published by Karma, New York, in 2022.

Front room:

Terminal (red)
2018
Enamel paint on wood in two parts
91 1/2 x 9 x 10 1/2 inches (232.41 x 22.86 x 26.67 cm)

Untitled (wall box II)
2023
Enamel paint on paper
9 3/4 x 7 3/4 x 5 1/2 inches (24.77 x 19.69 x 13.97 cm)

Yardwork
2023
Tablecloth, clothesline, clothes pins, enamel paint on steel rope cleats and screws
Installation dimensions variable

Red Boots
2023
Enamel paint on artist’s boots
Right boot: 9 x 13 x 7 1/4 inches (22.86 x 33.02 x 18.42 cm)
Left boot: 9 3/4 x 13 x 6 1/2 inches (24.77 x 33.02 x 16.51 cm)

Ode
2023
Acrylic, gesso, graphite on canvas
77 x 55 inches (195.58 x 139.7 cm)

Twin Infinitives
2023
Eight cast plaster artist’s fists and 3 lbs of Red Delicious apples
Installation dimensions variable

Back room:

Untitled (wall box I)
2023
Enamel paint on paper, plexi box frame
7 x 5 x 1 3/8 inches (17.78 x 12.7 x 3.49 cm)

Untitled (compost)
2023
Digital c-print
7 x 5 inches (17.78 x 12.7 cm)
Edition of 3 + 1 AP

Recursion
2014 (abridged, 2023)
Inkjet color prints mounted on drywall, screwed to wall
60 x 120 inches (152.4 x 304.8 cm)

Wound Object
2023
Enamel paint on wood
3 x 10 x 4 1/2 inches (7.62 x 25.4 x 11.43 cm)

Knotted Object
2023
Neckties, ring wall bracket
24 3/8 x 7 x 4 inches (61.91 x 17.78 x 10.16 cm)

Dead Wackers
2023
String trimmers, zip-ties, Gorilla Tape, gardening wire
69 1/2 x 23 x 26 inches (176.53 x 58.42 x 66.04 cm)

Installation photography of Adam Marnie The Red Show © Alex Barber

For more information, contact Laura Hughes or Edwin Smalling at info@basket-books.com