Marta Abbott

Marta Abbott (Amsterdam, 1983) is a Czech-American artist living and working in Rome. Her multidisciplinary practice spans paper, canvas, ceramics, photography, and video, exploring the connections between the organic, metamorphic, and transience through a layered visual language. She is drawn to giving form to overlooked stories that traverse and exceed human temporality, to interacting with nature-culture systems of knowledge, and to foregrounding other forms of planetary intelligence.

Techniques such as cyanotype, etching, and ink printing intertwine in a continuous redefinition of the boundaries between media. While rooted in historical practices, these experiments are renewed through processes that bring the embedded memory of materials into the present. Abbott’s work thrives on encounters and collisions: inks, pigments, clays, and oxides combine in a constant tension between controlled gestures and chance. Materials are never merely tools, but living presences: carriers of stories, properties, and resistances that demand attentiveness and technical sensitivity.

Series such as Moon Garden (2023) and Stargazers. Pietra viva (2022) reflect a desire to capture the ephemeral and meditate on the transience of the real. Recurring inspirations come from bodies of water and plant forms that, in an alchemical key, evoke life cycles and their inevitable impermanence. Her research expands on the relationship between moonlight and things that bloom in the dark. With this regard, Abbott recently found a ketophyllum fossil, an ancient coral, dating back 420-443 million years, when the Earth rotated faster and the year lasted 420 days. Prompted by this, the artist wondered how the rhymes of the Earth and tides might have shaped the form of such creatures. Drawn to the crinoline-like strata of the fossil, she turned this speculation into Ketophyllum, a series of stoneware sculptures interlacing time, form, and memory inviting the viewer to surface buried fragments of the natural world.