Mariel Capanna

Giornata

February 15, 2025–January 25, 2026

Mariel Capanna

Cigarette, Candles, Fireworks, Swan

2022
Oil, wax, and chalk on panel
Courtesy of the artist and Adams and Ollman
 

Mariel Capanna (b. 1988, Philadelphia, where she lives and works) plays what she calls “games of remembering” as a way of reckoning with loss. Working from home videos and family slideshows, whose runtime is her constraint, the artist races to record fleeting memory images in oil paint. She scatters these flat, pastel forms like confetti across deep, atmospheric surfaces, creating compositions that are at once jubilant and wistful. For the Clark, Capanna presents two new, site-specific oil paintings as well as a monumental, two-sided fresco. The fresco process is also defined by time constraints: the term giornata has referred, since the Italian Renaissance, to the area of wet plaster that can be painted in a single day. Mariel Capanna: Giornata marks the artist’s first museum solo exhibition.

This year-long installation, free and open to the public, is organized by the Clark Art Institute and curated by Robert Wiesenberger, curator of contemporary projects.

Generous support for Mariel Capanna: Giornata is provided by Margaret and Richard Kronenberg.