Treatise of a Coat

This inaugural monograph showcases Helen Marten's works on paper created between 2019 and 2025, gathering for the first time a comprehensive survey of the English artist's drawing and painting practice. The publication features works executed in colored pencil, watercolor, ink, airbrush, acrylic, and graphite—alongside more unusual media like sand, silicone, and olive oil—presenting a sumptuous visual document of Marten's material investigations on paper.

Designed as an "unruly artist's book," Treatise of a Coat has multiple physical and linguistic folds. The title offers an oblique reference to Honoré de Balzac's Treatise on Modern Stimulants, embracing the desire for essayistic but paradoxical world building. The publication emphasizes the physicality of making a work on paper, with the word "coat" functioning both as literal garment and as verb signifying layers of visual material. As Marten herself notes, this "treatise" is no such thing—neither formal nor systematic with its subjects.

Helen Marten (b. 1985, Macclesfield, UK) is the youngest recipient of Britain's Turner Prize, which she won in 2016 alongside the inaugural Hepworth Prize for Sculpture. She studied at the Ruskin School of Drawing and Fine Art, University of Oxford, graduating in 2008. Her practice spans sculpture, painting, video, and writing, creating work that questions the stability of the material world and our place within it. Marten is also the author of the novel The Boiled in Between (2020) and is currently working on a second novel and a book of essays on containers.

The book includes essays by Elfriede Jelinek, Eve Esfandiari-Denney, Claire Gilman, and Felix Bernstein. Published in conjunction with Marten's 2025 exhibition at Sadie Coles HQ in London, this volume represents a major statement on her works on paper. Her work is held in collections including The Museum of Modern Art New York, Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Moderna Museet Stockholm, Julia Stoschek Collection Düsseldorf, and Astrup Fearnley Museet Oslo. She was included in the 2013 and 2015 Venice Biennales and is represented by Greene Naftali in New York and Sadie Coles HQ in London.