Imogen Marsteller, Orchids always remind me of my mother (2025). Full view.
Source and artwork: Imogen Marsteller.
All views · 2 images
© Imogen Marsteller.
From the collection
Imogen Marsteller
Orchids always remind me of my mother, 2025
- Year
- 2025
- Medium
- Oil on paper
- Dimensions
- 38 × 29 cm (H × W)
Title, date and medium follow the artist’s published work entry. Dimensions are given height × width, as confirmed by the collector.
About the work
Gesture, memory and intimacy
A figure turns away from the viewer, raising her arms across her head. Blue skin and a turquoise ground are traced by vivid pink contours, while an orange orchid introduces a concentrated note of warmth beside the partly concealed face. The patterned fabric, tied across the back, gives the intimate gesture a decorative rhythm.
The title connects a flower to the recollection of a mother. It invites a reading of the orchid as a carrier of personal memory, without fixing the scene as a literal portrait or explaining the relationship it evokes. The turned body and interrupted view of the face hold closeness and privacy together: something is offered to the viewer, while something remains withheld.
Within the Joseph Clark Collection, the work can be approached through its psychological intimacy. Gesture, colour and association carry feeling without requiring a resolved narrative. This reading is the collection’s interpretation of the reproduced image; the artist’s published entry supplies the title and object details.
About the artist
Imogen Marsteller is a painter born in Tucson, Arizona, and based in London. She studied at Sarah Lawrence College in New York and completed an MFA at Goldsmiths, University of London. Her current artist biography dates that qualification to 2024. A residency at the Fish Factory Creative Centre in Stöðvarfjörður, Iceland, gave her a period of concentrated experimentation before the continued development of her London practice.
Practice and ideas
Marsteller’s paintings examine contemporary intimacy through narratives of growing up, relationships and self-understanding. Personal experience and the lives of women around her enter into a wider consideration of how women’s stories are represented in media. Strong contours, shifts of tone and playful colour can make a scene feel immediate while leaving its emotional situation unresolved.
Her stated references include Pop, Renaissance and Baroque art, with particular attention to women artists. These sources are brought into a graphic and painterly vocabulary rather than quoted as a fixed historical style. Objects, gestures and titles can carry personal associations, making the work attentive to what is communicated directly and what remains unspoken. The resulting scenes invite close looking without requiring the viewer to know the private event behind an image.
Career and selected projects
Marsteller’s published CV includes Finding Friends at Sarah Lawrence College in 2020, Figuratively Speaking at Maximilian Wolfgang Gallery in 2023–24 and appearances in the Southwark Park Gallery Annual Open Exhibition. She was shortlisted for the Hari Art Prize in 2023, longlisted for the Women in Art Prize in 2024 and included in the Ruth Borchard Self-Portrait Prize longlist in 2025. Her work was shown with Zarastro Art at London Art Fair in January 2026.
Sources and further reading
Collection research reviewed 18 October 2026. Interpretative commentary is distinguished from documented career information.
Artwork sources
Artist-supplied information consulted 17 October 2026.