Madison Tubbs
MFA Painting, Room 320
“plains in time,” 30” x 40” , acrylic on canvas
My practice is an exercise in challenging inherited modes of seeing. I don't think of my paintings as images but as models for understanding. Through the act of making, I questionwhat a painting can become, what it can hold, and how it might expand beyond its expected form. In the generative process of making I learn not only about the possibilities of painting, but about the elasticity of perception itself.
Starting with some of the most basic elements of painting: line, color, and transparency, my work explores what new possibilities can emerge when they are stacked, shifted, and suspended together. The surface becomes a lived field of time, residue, and repetition. A space where contradiction is not resolved, but held and suspended together. My paintings hold this dialectic not as a battle, but as an unfolding, where color arrives not from pigment alone but from the ghost of every layer beneath it, carrying the memory of what came before.
My investigation of perception extends beyond the canvas, into materials and processes that translate principles of color theory into lived experience. I use my understanding of painting as a framework to explore how color operates in space, light, and material. These experiment allow me to question how perception is constructed, how it shifts over time and through sustained attention, and how visual experience might open into new ways of understanding the world.
Madison Tubbs
Madison Tubbs is a painter from a small town in western Kansas, currently based in Philadelphia. Her abstract paintings explore the potential of line and color using acrylic paint to investigate its ability to shift, accumulate, and render spatial complexity within the limits of a two-dimensional field. Her process emphasizes transparency and layering, often revealing the history of each painting within its surface. Rooted in formal concerns, Tubbs’s work engages theoretical ideologies from art history and philosophy, considering painting not only as a visual experience but as a tool capable of shaping cultural thought.
Tubbs received her BFA from the University of Kansas in 2018 and is currently an MFA candidate in the Painting Program at Tyler School of Art and Architecture in Philadelphia. Her work has been exhibited in Denver, Snowmass Village, Kansas City, Lawrence, as well as Knoxville, Tennessee. Her rural upbringing and interest in abstraction inform a practice that is both materially attentive and conceptually driven, focused on the language of painting as an evolving and active site of inquiry.