Noah Mashiak
(b. 1999, US)
- By Sylvia Walker
Noah Mashiak is an American artist, residing and working in London, who is best known for their abstract paintings marked by excess, a peculiar restlessness, and the use of language and symbols. Their canvases spill over, dense with detail, as if the act of holding back has never occurred to them. The paintings appear as if grown rather than made—each edge crawling with pattern, gesture, and form, leaving no space unconsidered. If there is such a thing as a maximalist whisper, Mashiak paints it: work that buzzes with energy and yet knows when to quiet down. It is a balancing act between rigor and release, insistence and retreat.
Educated at the Rhode Island School of Design and the Royal College of Art, their practice is rooted in abstraction, but it leans towards something more bodily, more tactile. One is reminded of networks: neural, fungal, digital. There is an architecture to these compositions, but one that breaks the blueprint. Their process is meticulous, even devotional, and they describe it as a secular reach toward the ineffable—an attempt to crack open everyday perception and dissolve categorical thinking. What emerges is a visual language that feels both ancient and futuristic. Organic motifs press up against repeating grids; text symbols flicker in and out of their oeuvre like coded messages. The result is a kind of structured delirium, each painting dense with contradiction and possibility.
In their layered compositions, a horror vacui takes hold: the fear of empty space animates the surface with an intensity that feels at once claustrophobic and generous. Even in moments of monochrome calm, where color drains to a single tone, Mashiak punctuates the quiet with sharp formal interventions. These breaks in rhythm become their own form of emphasis, revealing the painter’s capacity to choreograph attention. There is bravery in this kind of visual insistence—an unwillingness to tidy up for the sake of clarity. Mashiak paints not to resolve, but to inhabit contradiction. It is a world of detail, of overload, and of surprising restraint—a steady push and pull that keeps the eye moving and the mind alert. In their hands, abstraction becomes a site of both saturation and clarity, a field where thought and feeling work in tandem, and where the edge of the canvas is only the beginning.
Maximalist, all-over compositions, in which the accumulation of patterns feels equally expansive and infinitesimal, are inspired by the natural world, and organic networks are married to a rigid, repetitive structure to create spaces where extremes can coexist without contradiction. Their process is both laborious and meditative, and they consider it a secular method of reaching towards the ineffable—deconstructing everyday patterns and dissolving the barriers of taxonomic thinking. For instance, in “Thoracic Cage ” (2023), Mashiak incorporates anatomical references and domestic patterns into a hauntingly stark black-and-white composition. The title directly references the rib cage, and the visual logic of the painting appears to echo this skeletal architecture. Yet the patterned surface also evokes faded wallpaper or printed fabric, something intimate and familiar. It’s this interplay between the bodily and the decorative, between structure and vulnerability, that anchors the work in a quiet intensity.
On the other hand, Schwa (2022) is a painting that refuses to overstate. A muted surface carries only a single phonetic symbol: ə, the schwa. It’s the soft vowel sound found in most unstressed syllables in English, the linguistic filler we barely hear. Mashiak renders this minor presence monumental, turning linguistic marginalia into a central visual moment. It’s a minimalist gesture, yet deeply resonant. Furthermore, Ruminations (2022) is as layered in meaning as it is in material. The work, built through transfers, drawing, and paint, suggests a map of thought in flux. Like its title, it circles both the mental act of deep reflection and its etymological cousin in the animal world—the slow, repetitive act of chewing. The visual field is dense, its rhythms obsessive. Here, Mashiak equates mental activity with pattern and texture, each mark a trace of interior movement.
Pyrexia (2024) seems to translate the bodily experience of fever into a painted language as suggested by its title. A tightly calibrated sequence of concentric rectangles collapses inward toward a searing red center. It’s a small canvas, yet it throbs with intensity. The work captures both the subjective heat of illness and the wider implications of a body in distress. Color, here, becomes temperature; structure, a pulse. To conclude, physicality does not end with body temperature or bodily references. In an Untitled piece from 2022, Mashiak integrates lavender, cyclamen, and paper pulp into a painted wooden panel. The work operates as both image and object, a reliquary of the botanical. A material body becomes pictorial language. The lavender appears not only as material but as a memory—fragile, aromatic, and past—preserving a trace of the living world within the confines of painting.
Born in 1999 in the United States of America, Noah Mashiak now lives and works in London, the United Kingdom. They hold a BFA in Painting from Rhode Island School of Design and an MA from the Royal College of Art. Recent notable exhibitions include venues such as Tabernacle in London, Tate Modern in London, the Phony Art Collective in Brighton, and the Truman Brewery in London. A TIM Foundation Art Scholarship, a residency at ASC Studio Residency, and features in various art magazines including Divide Magazine and London Paint Club underscore Mashiak rise in the London in art scene.
For more information, please consult the artist’s website here.
Last Updated on June 12, 2025
About the author:
Sylvia Walker (b. 1986, US) is an art historian, essayist, art critic, and curator. After contributing to numerous publications, and curating exhibitions in the United States of America and beyond, she currently works as the assistant director of Contemporary Art Issue (CAI).
