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Francesca Mollett’s Architecture of Abstraction

In her paintings, what we see is never fixed or stable; instead, she depicts the world as first captured by our senses in shifting gradients of light, color and form.

Francesca Mollett swiftly captured the attention of curators and collectors with her magmatic abstractions, which evoke and embrace the pure alchemical magic of painting to mimic the perpetual flow of matter and energy—the origins of everything. Her canvases create sensory and poetic, almost whimsical spaces, exploring how purely abstract landscapes and mindscapes can still evoke and provoke subtle sensations, hallucinations and visions tied to our relationship with the physical world.

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We met as she was finishing the installation of her latest show at GRIMM in New York, where Mollett described her process as beginning with structure but remaining open to accident, sensation and revision. Her first decisions are often formal: areas of density and the dynamic between different spatial fronts. From there, works develop through layering, interruptions and adjustments, as she moves in and out of the work mentally as much as physically. Light becomes an important indicator in establishing the composition. “There might be an idea of light, then a shift and then a very deep darkness. That becomes the starting structure,” she explained. “I’m quite interested in the relation to space, and in how the body is........

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