THE POOL IN THE NIGHT

MADISON WARP

May 10, 2025 – June 8, 2025

Opening reception Saturday May 10, 2025 from 7-10 pm

For appointments and inquiries please email friendofafriendgallery@gmail.com or message @friendofafrienddenver on instagram

Friend of a Friend is excited to announce our next exhibition,The Pool In The Night, by Detroit/New York based painter Madison Warp opening Saturday May 10, 2025 from 7-10 pm. This will be Madison’s first solo exhibition nationally after receiving her MFA at Cranbrook Academy of Art in Detroit, Michigan in 2025.

Warp presents a body of work that explores the subconscious link between her contemporary lived experience as a woman and the brink of her subconscious. The work presented offers an initial deep-dive into establishing a visual language and world building practice, existing at multiple times and dimensions at once. Eerie cinematic spirit-scapes set the scene for objects and avatars that hold a particular emotional buoyancy for the artist. Warp fleshes out places that have been sites of healing and worlds that explore toxic patterns in the artist’s lived experience. Trusting her intuitive approach, she allows the first pass of pigment to serve as a the luminous foundation for the worlds that unfold as the paintings and drawings narrow in on their reflective truths. 

The paintings in this body of work are the culmination of an important transitional period in the artist’s life and take cues from both cinema and surrealist traditions. Finding inspiration in the mysterious worlds of Leonora Carrington and glowing women of Remedios Varo, Warp creates a language reliant on atmospheric narrative and ominous color palettes highlighted with deep reds and radioactive greens. She then turns to contemporaries such as Hillary Harkness and Eunnam Hong- artists who also use the feminine form in a repetitive nature, outlining toxic cycles of social conditioning and harm against women. Commentary on class structures and capitalist obsession with the “once removed” from wealth are also themes the artist works with. Directors such as Sophia Coppola and Peter Greenaway have instructed her on how to visually create compelling stages for drama and arenas of contemporary “long since past” idolatry. 

This series also marks a moment of material exploration for her practice, allowing for a gravitation towards materials that allow throughlines in the artist’s life to take their most honest form. Using wire to create fish skeletons and cigarette boxes to make paintings, she has allowed her imagined symbols and childhood turned adulthood surroundings to take on a new role in her work. Through the artist relinquishing control and relying on her subconscious to guide her forward, a new vision for the practice is created. A world where gender dynamics and feminist roles are questioned, relationships grow and evolve, and a space of reflection pushes the work into new universes of dynamic discovery.

Madison Warp (b. Denver, CO)  is a Detroit based artist who received an MFA in Painting from Cranbrook Academy of Art in 2025 and a BFA in Arts Practices, BA International Affairs, Minor in Art History from University of Colorado Boulder in 2021. She has shown nationally in New York, Detroit, Boulder and Denver. She will be moving to New York this summer.