Marieken Cochius

Biography

Marieken Cochius trained in photography and then film and video at the St. Joost art academy in Breda, the Netherlands, winning a Dutch national video prize in 1992 before leaving the academy to settle in New York. Self-taught in drawing, painting and sculpture, she first worked in Brooklyn, making art photographs and assemblages from found electronic parts. She has credited long trips to deserts and wild places across North America with reshaping her work.

Today her subject is the movement inside natural systems: root networks, river boils, gusts of wind. She works from observation but abstracts what she sees, increasingly through the material of steel, including rusted plate and blow-torch drawings on zinc. Her Motherboard series combines organic materials with metallic surfaces.

Cochius moved to Beacon in 2012. Her public sculpture Gathering, driftwood on metal, was commissioned by the Village of Wappingers Falls with Hudson River Foundation support. She received an NYSCA Decentralization individual artist commission in 2021 and a Foundation for Contemporary Arts emergency grant in 2020. Recent solo shows include Vassar College's Palmer Gallery and SUNY Ulster (2022), Garrison Art Center (2025) and TurnPark Art Space (2026), with shows in Deventer, the Netherlands. Her ties to Holland Tunnel run from Williamsburg group shows in 1999 and 2002 through the 2016 solo A Space Once Occupied, Now Empty, the 2018 Newburgh opening, Terra/Derma (2020) and Reclamation (2025). She also curated Energy Fields in Beacon in 2014.

Practice. Abstract sculpture in steel and metal, drawing and oil painting that channel movement in nature, such as water currents, wind and growth patterns; for Reclamation she showed blow-torch drawings on zinc and rusted steel.