Marten-English — ARIEL PLOTEK ART CONSULTING

Ruth Marten is an artist whose practice reanimates historical imagery through precise, witty, and subversive intervention.

"All About Eve", 26, 2023, gouache on vintage photogravure.

Over the past two decades, she has developed a distinctive visual language by painting directly onto found prints—first 18th-century engravings and, more recently, early 20th-century sources—shifting their meaning through carefully calibrated additions. Her work draws on a deep understanding of surrealism, satire, and the absurd, transforming inherited imagery into newly charged, contemporary narratives.

“The young women subjects of these pictures were Folies Bergère dancers—or their friends. They had just passed through a wartime adolescence and had been raised in a society where Victorian attitudes and paternalism still held sway. WWI changed everything, mechanizing warfare and terrifying the populace. Its end saw new ideas welcomed in and outdated morality discarded. Gone were the strangulating corsets, shorn were the long coiffures into the bobs worn by the new icons of the silent film. The Jazz Age! Cinema! Sex! Josephine Baker! Surrealism! Dangerous ideas! My heart is thrilled by this, and when I’m painting on these prints I feel a tremendous kinship with these women. We are one and the same.”

"All About Eve", 44, 2024, gouache on vintage photogravure.

Marten began her latest series, All About Eve, in 2022. She finds the materials that provide her point of departure at flea markets and antiquarian bookshops. Using watercolor, ink, and a scalpel, Marten meticulously alters and adds to the print with remarkable dexterity, imagination, and humor.

Her evident respect for the original prints, and the graceful manner in which she weaves in her own exquisite and surreal contributions, make it difficult for the viewer to distinguish her marks from the original.

Marten’s background as a tattoo artist and illustrator informs her exceptional command of line and her sensitivity to the delicate balance between reverence and disruption. Her interventions do not overwrite history; instead, they collaborate with it. By subtly altering figures, structures, and motifs, she opens each print to imaginative multiplicities, inviting viewers to question both the authority and the limitations of historical representation.

From 1972 to 1980 Marten was an important figure in the tattoo underground and, as one of the few women practicing the craft, influenced people's ideas about body decoration. Working during the disco and punk era, she also tattooed in the Musée D'Art Moderne de La Ville de Paris during the 10th Biennale de Paris in 1977.

Recent works

Ruth Marten

American born 1949

Ruth Marten began her career as a tattoo artist in the 1970s before working as an illustrator for various publishers and magazines in the United States. It was during this period that she honed the techniques of overpainting and collage that would later become central to her artistic practice.

Transforming 18th- and 19th-century engravings—and, more recently, early 20th-century photographs—Marten shifts their meaning through meticulously calibrated additions. Her work draws on a deep understanding of illustration, satire, and the absurd, transforming inherited images into contemporary narratives charged with new significance.

Her recent series, All About Eve, reflects on the radical cultural upheavals of the 1920s. The photogravures reworked by Marten depict dancers from French variety theater, embodying the new freedoms of the post-war era. Through her artistic interventions, Marten explores the complexities of this historical moment, infusing her figures with subversive humor.

Her work is held in the permanent collections of the New York Public Library and the de Young Museum in San Francisco. Her most recent book, All About Eve (DruckVerlag Kettler), was published in 2025.