Marion Piper

Marion Piper (born 1963) is a British artist based in Norfolk, with a disciplined drawing and painting practice of geometric abstraction. She reworks modernist tropes in a way that goes beyond the compositional balance, repetition and emotion-through-colour that defined much of the mid-twentieth-century Geometric Abstraction movements. Those elements remain in her work, but with a distinctly twenty-first-century quality: balance becomes transposition; repetition is a simulacral divergence in which the same never returns in quite the same way; memory carries an emotional integrity for those who recognise it; and colour reflects temporal experience, where memory collides with the immediate moment of making.

Her geometric abstraction is one of infinite permutation. Unlike in modernism, the grid is not the foundation of her work but the infrastructure over which line and shape move and evolve, and space arises from that rhythm rather than by design. This focus on mutability, and an incidental relationship to space, sets her work apart from other expressions of the genre.

Piper exhibits internationally and across the UK. Her work was included in Anglian Abstract (2026), curated by Emma Howe, Director of The Minories in Colchester, an invitational survey celebrating the legacy of modernism in East Anglia, in which contemporary artists responded to the work of Margaret Mellis, a key figure in the artistic community of St Ives and later in Suffolk. As a member of the Drawing Collective, she has shown at Gallery Abstract Project in Paris and The Draw Space in Sydney. Her work has been selected for the Royal Academy Summer Exhibition three times, in 2022, 2024 and 2025. She is a member of the Norfolk Contemporary Art Society.