This essay was written in conjunction with Marilyn Lerner: Harmonies, on view at CUE September 8 – October 15, 2016.

When I met the painter Marilyn Lerner in her Chelsea studio on a sweltry June morning, I was impressed to learn that the small couch in the middle of the room was not there for sitting, as I had assumed, but was actually the place that the slight, curly-haired artist slept every night as she advanced her newest body of acutely colored, geometric abstractions. Knowing this, the short distance to her actual bedroom—located several yards away behind a freestanding partition—became more metaphorical than physical. The passage from the psychological realms of the work to her living quarters and back was apparently too great to make over and over again; as she traveled deeper into the latter, it was necessary to set up a bed there, rest, and wake with the work each day in order to move farther with it. Lerner’s obsessive immersion gives us the privilege of encountering paintings that have been created slowly, and with minimal outside influence, as opposed to the influx of external references so common in much “post-internet” painting of today.