Marta Feld works in layers until the linen disappears.
A studio visit in Leipzig, where a single painting takes four months and the last coat decides everything.
The studio is on the third floor of a former textile works, and the first thing Marta Feld says is that the light is wrong today. It is not wrong. It is grey, even, and completely unremarkable — which, she explains, is the only condition in which she trusts a colour decision.
She has been painting the same four canvases since March. Each one carries between nine and fourteen layers of thinned acrylic, and she can name every one of them from memory. The linen underneath has long since stopped showing through, which she treats as the moment the work begins rather than ends.
Four months to a surface
The method is deliberately slow. A layer dries for two days before the next goes on; anything faster and the colours mix instead of sitting over one another. What she is after is a surface that appears to hold light rather than reflect it, and that only happens when each coat stays distinct.
If you can still see the linen, I have not finished asking the question.
She waited two years before offering prints of anything. The concern was not reproduction quality but attribution: she wanted the work to arrive with her name on it and a record of what it is, not as a decorative object with an unnamed origin. We tested Nummer 18 on three papers before she agreed to list it, and she chose the one that lost the least in the darkest passages.
What she is working on next
A series of five, all the same size, all begun on the same day. She expects to finish in February and has already decided that two of them will not be shown.