Maud Madsen Explores the Gaps Between Memories
Maud Madsen was in the second year of her master’s studies at New York Academy of Art when the COVID-19 pandemic hit. As the then-novel coronavirus forced the world to shut down in 2020, Madsen halted work on projects taking shape in the studio and retreated to her eight-foot by eight-foot bedroom with little more than a box of acrylics, paper, and pencils. She drew a lot and began painting images of structures often associated with childhood, like blanket forts, treehouses, and sandcastles.
“I think part of it was because when you’re in your bedroom during quarantine in New York City, you just want to be anywhere other than right here, right now,” Madsen says on a recent video call from her Brooklyn studio. “I was thinking about building blanket forts as a kid as a way to escape or environments that I could control and thinking about how could I insert a character into that space.”
Out of this unexpected turn of events, Madsen developed the style for which she is becoming known. When we spoke in early March 2022, she was preparing for a May solo show at Marianne Boesky Gallery.
Madsen’s narrative, semi-autobiographic paintings frequently position young adults inside spaces made for children. Their bodies might be awkwardly crammed inside toy cars or between narrow school bus seats. Other times, Madsen places the characters in the midst of situations associated with childhood and adolescence, tapping into the complicated mix of emotions that come with memory.
In the midst of the pandemic, Madsen began exploring the gap between memories and actual events in her work. “In part it came out of phone calls that I would make to my mom during quarantine. I would catch myself lying to her about how well I was doing, just for her own comfort, not wanting to make her uncomfortable with how badly I was doing,” she says. “I was thinking about all sorts of times that I lied by omission or edited my retellings when it comes to stories from my past for the comfort of my listener. That’s where the imagery started to come from, revisiting stories that I had maybe sanitized or edited for the comfort of my listener and reexamining those as an adult.”
Madsen says that, while there were bits and pieces of her style emerging prior to the pandemic, it didn’t begin to fully emerge until April of 2020 as she drew during lockdown. Amongst the pieces that came out of this period are “Flightless Bird” and “All That Meat and No Potatoes.” She started drawing “Flightless Bird” in May 2020 and finished painting it in December of that year, after lockdown ended and she was able to get a studio space. Madsen pits two adults in the midst of a game of airplane. It’s a seemingly uncomfortable balancing act, with one character hoisted in the air by the feet of the other, that takes place in a youthful bedroom with glow-in-the-dark stars and a crescent moon hovering around the ceiling fan and a Lisa Frank-esque poster on the wall.
Meanwhile, in “All That Meat and No Potatoes,” a young woman trails behind a competitor in a potato sack race, her hair flying forward as if she tries to gain an edge on the field. Madsen notes that these two works helped her develop a recurring character in her paintings—a caricature of her self and her world. “They were really important in thinking about the environment that she exists in,” she says.
I was thinking about all sorts of times that I lied by omission or edited my retellings when it comes to stories from my past for the comfort of my listener.”
Raised in Edmonton, Canada, Madsen had different career aspirations in her youth. “I wanted to be an engineer actually,” she says. “I think because the most creative person in my life was my dad and he was an engineer. I was like, ‘that’s what creative people do.’”
After the urging of a high school teacher, Madsen went on to study art at the University of Alberta. “I came out of the program with a lot of skills, but I didn’t know what I wanted to say with my work,” she says. “I ended up working a desk job for two years after that. I didn’t do art at all. I paid for a studio just so I could tell people that I had a studio, but I didn’t make any work.”
But while working as a recruiter for her university, Madsen had an epiphany. “I spent all day talking about all those things that you can do with an art degree—different types of degrees—and what kind of opportunities are out there,” she says. “I realized that there was so much more that I could have gotten out of my art degree.”
So Madsen headed to New York Academy of Art for graduate school. “I was really interested in the idea of talking about my own experience in my body,” she says. Back in 2018, when she first moved to New York, Madsen thought she would pursue this through photorealistic painting. That’s actually why she chose the school. “I ended up graduating making work that in theory I wanted to make work about,” she says, “but ended up doing it in a completely different way because of what I was exposed to working in New York.”
There were a lot of learning experiences as Madsen searched for her artistic path. “When I came into the program, I didn’t have very strong painting chops,” Madsen says. “I ended up only drawing in my first year of my program because I only understood the principles that were being taught in my drawing classes. I shied away from painting on my own.”
When she did begin painting, Madsen moved away from using photographic references and towards the imagined spaces and characters in her head. “This is the stylistic language that emerged from that,” she says. “It’s the natural way that I draw.”
Ultimately, Madsen’s characters veered far from photorealism. Their proportions can be unusual—extremely long fingers have become one of the artist’s hallmarks—and they often contort and stretch across the canvas. These choices reflect the themes that Madsen handles in her work. The long fingers can represent idealized femininity. The way that the characters are positioned can speak to memories of childhood, of growing up and physically outgrowing some surroundings. “Obviously, they’re adult figures in spaces that are usually reserved for children,” she says. “When I think about that period of my life, it’s that time when I suddenly became aware of my body in a different way, like how my body exists in space, or how it might exist for other people in certain contexts.”
She adds, “The idea of growing and spilling and stretching and expanding, in a lot of my compositions I’m trying to amplify that.”
This is where drawing is a crucial part of Madsen’s process. All of her paintings begin as drawings, which she will often repeat until a scene visually reflects the emotions of the experience that inspired the work. “I’ll recreate it again and again to push how I can expand and position the body within the composition,” she says of her drawings.
That’s what I’m interested in with these pieces—a little bit more confusion, so you have to sit with the work more to figure out what’s happening.”
Take “Two Can Play” as an example of how images morph through repeated drawing. In the final painting, two characters are crawling through a tube as if they are in competition. One character climbs over the other, pressing the face of the other to the side. “I was thinking specifically about women existing in those spaces and competing with each other for those spaces,” says Madsen. “I’ve been thinking about my own internalized misogyny and the ideas around being both a victim and a perpetrator of certain misogynistic ideas.”
Initially, Madsen considered incorporating three characters into the painting. “I wanted it to both feel familiar and somewhat real, but there are spatial anomalies—things that don’t quite work in the pieces—sort of like discrepancies,” she says. “I guess when I was doing the drawings, three figures felt too much and two figures felt quite right.”
As Madsen refined her technical process, she also reconsidered what she was painting. “I wanted to make work that was personal, but I had a lot of false starts,” she says, adding that initially she thought that more generalized subject matter would appeal to a broader audience. “What I really needed was to get more specific about my experience in the details of my work,” she says.
She incorporates very personal details into the paintings. Madsen’s recurring main character has keratosis pilaris, a condition that manifests with small bumps at the hair follicles. “I had it really bad as a kid,” says Madsen. “I still have it.”
The clothing that characters wear in the paintings are often based on her own wardrobe and hand-me-downs that have gone through the family. She points to a painting in her studio during the interview, notes that the character is wearing a snowsuit that was passed down through her family. “That’s where I’ll bring in a photo reference,” she says. “I have one of my sister wearing that snow suit.”
Similarly, in “Watch Your Step,” two feet stand on a rug based on one that use to lay on the basement floor of Madsen’s family home.
As Madsen prepares for her solo show, her work is continuing to evolve. On a narrative level, she says, the primary character in her paintings is taking a more active role in the stories that unfold.
On a technical level, Madsen is playing with color and light in her work. “I’m really interested in how light and color can help add specificity to time and place,” she says. She mentions the piece “Play the Game,” where her character sits at a school desk, head laying down on it. There she finds the contrast between “cold desks” and “warm light” filtering into the classroom. These kind of details not only add specificity; Madsen says they also serve to add more ambiguity. “That’s what I’m interested in with these pieces—a little bit more confusion, so you have to sit with the work more to figure out what’s happening.”*
This article appears in Hi-Fructose issue 63. Get the full article and issue in print here.
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