Elias Marrow

For 38 years, there was nothing. Now fragments of presence. Marrow assigns value to silence
Conceptual Artist. Cultural Surgeon.

Site UNFINISHED as the artist is working on a projects in Berlin, will be done SOON!

"The glossy encasement recalls taxidermy, a kind of preservation of function long after function has died. The steel base offers no comfort — it elevates, yes, but to what end? This is proletariat minimalism turned inside out: honest, hostile, and immaculately dumb."Ursula Götz, Galerie Eisenhaut, Hamburg. Published in Nachbild: Schrift für Entleerte Objekte, Vol. 17, 2024 (print only edition)

Unit #6 interrogates the aesthetic burden of functional material. In isolating a single reclaimed brick and elevating it on a fabricated steel plinth, Marrow draws attention to the architectural afterthoughts that quite literally uphold society — yet remain unacknowledged, invisible, and devalued.The work explores mass as metaphor, reframing the object’s load-bearing past as a symbol of cultural weight, institutional fatigue, and the performative labour of the working class. The glossy coating forces a confrontation with surface: preservation or suffocation?In its stillness, Unit #6 dares the viewer to ask: what are we really building, and for whom?Seen at:Galerie Eisenhaut, Hamburg, Germany
Group show: “Form & Function: The Object in Resistance”
(A concrete-heavy, minimalist space “specialising” in post-material conceptual sculpture)
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Bunker19, Vilnius, Lithuania
Solo intervention: “False Supports”
(A disused Cold War structure turned artist-led space, known for “non-linear retrospectives”)
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The Calx Room, Deptford, London
Installation: “Objects Left Behind (and Made to Stay)”
(An unfunded South London project space operated out of a shuttered tile showroom; rarely open to the public)£18,800

Lunar Proxy, Inverted

Mixed media on canvas (unknown origin)The work resists narrative. A single sphere — incomplete, or simply unconcerned with completion — anchors a field of particulate motion. Is this moon? Is this silence? Marrow never clarifies.The title alludes to a metric that’s never explained. Some viewers have suggested solar imagery; others, an explosion mid-gesture. The artist neither confirms nor denies.
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Mixed media on canvas, 2023
Sold – £14,700 (private collection, Oslo)
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Marrow’s 'Sun at 97%' is at once cosmic and suburban — a planetary body rendered not in light, but in fallout. It glows, yes, but the glow is post-failure.Whether it's sun, stain, or sanctified residue, the piece hovers between origin myth and domestic accident. Like much of Marrow’s output, it resists being archived. One gets the feeling it was never meant to be seen, only recovered.*– Florian Kessler, Kritikplastik, Issue No. 42 (2024)

UNIT 8 ALLEGORY OF SILENCE

Mixed media | Undeclared location | 2025A muted form cast in stillness blindfolded, sealed, and uninvited.
This piece does not ask to be seen. It simply exists where it should not.
Its presence is not performative. Its meaning is not volunteered.
It is the silence left behind when critique becomes complicit.QR encoded. Location withheld.
Interpretation deferred.
Status £2330

Unit #9: Field Test

The ninth unit in an unstandardized series. A pastoral memory disrupted—violently assessed, then left to endure the record of its own failure. This piece questions the legitimacy of restoration, ownership, and permanence. Red is not emotion here. Red is data.
The frame was not consulted.
Status: Not for consumption
Year: 2022
£4650

Unit #2: Portrait of a Worker as Relic

The worker, the cog. The tool of their craft holds no value unless objectified — aestheticised — by those who never laboured. In a neocolonial era of monstrous appropriation, Marrow reclaims the tool not as function, but as monument.Medium: Rusted hand tool, time, neglect
Status: Reclaimed
Year: 2023Status: Not for sale
Exhibited: The Maintenance Room, Neue Szene (Berlin, 2025)

Unit 07: Sole Custody

Presence without procession. A gesture arrested mid-function.
Too singular to march, too fixed to flee.
The plinth supports only implication.No left. No right. No origin.
Just evidence that something once walked through.Status: £3350
Exhibited: The Maintenance Room, Neue Szene (Berlin, 2025)

Unit #11: Consensus

Painted in a single uninterrupted session and never reviewed, Unit #11 explores the violence of agreement.
The strokes are not layered — they are colliding.
Blue seeks reason. Red insists. Yellow interrupts. Black refuses.There is no foreground, no subject, no victory.
Just a collective attempt to be heard, ending — inevitably — in noise.Consensus is a myth. This is what it actually looks like.
Status: £2750
HRR812

Empty Plate

Framed pigment print.
2024There is a silence to Empty Plate that unnerves.
The plate is empty. The book is closed.
His uniform bears the insignia of an institution long since erased.
It is unclear whether he waits to be fed, punished, or simply forgotten.
Yn newyn, ceisiodd ddysgu; mewn tlodi, ceisia fyw; yng Nghymru, mae’n galw’n gartref.
Digital print on paper, custom made frame.
Gifted to Cardiff Museum, October 2025.Some say the work references Victorian charity propaganda. Others believe it’s a replica of a painting that never existed.
Elias Marrow has made no comment.It remains one of the few works in the collection to be given a name. But even that feels borrowed.

A GP's Wage

Framed, paper and ink.
2025
Available for £76,038.
Global Postage included.There is an unease to A GP’s Wage that lingers.
The page is blank. The figure is absent.
Only a number remains, a year of labour reduced to a single line.It is unclear whether this is an honour, an insult, or an audit.
Whether the work commemorates a profession, indicts a system, or simply records it.
The emptiness does not explain itself; it waits, patient and unblinking, like a file left open on the wrong desk.What remains is an uncomfortable truth:
value is neither earned nor given, it is assigned.

Contact Elias Marrow