A  Solo Exhibition.  

Precisely because painting does not ‘copy’ things but presents them immediately and bodily … so that we seem to be present at the fission of  ‘Being from the inside’ … painting gives a true sense of the internal animation of the world and what it means to see  Merleau Ponty        

Marguerite Horner’s practice is concerned with the non-material, a reality that is accessed through contemplation and painting. The value of a painting lies in its ability to induce a contemplative state in the viewer. As Walter Benjamin says ‘before it the spectator can abandon himself to his associations.’

For Horner, the value of contemplation lies in its ability to reconcile the heart and the mind into one. Horner looks into the ways in which man may be related to the infinite. Upon the framework of this enquiry her paintings aim to investigate, amongst other things, notions of transience, intimacy, loss and hope. Using the external world as a trigger or metaphor for these experiences and through a period of gestation and distillation, she makes a series of intuitive decisions that lead the work towards completion.

In her latest series of work the ‘external world’ is that of London, New York, Lincoln and the Catskills NY. From astute and minute observation of the day-to-day – a face at a window, reflected street lights or shuttered shops – she creates atmospheric canvases. We are forced to deliberate upon these moments that would normally disappear without trace or memory and consider the framework of our existence.

Private View Sunday 9 June from 2-5

Marguerite Horner