The North Wall Arts Centre, Oxford
24 April–11 May, 2025
This exhibition covered work done after Marjorie moved to Oxford from Chicago in 1975.
The image at the beginning of the video shows several of Marjorie’s more recent paintings in acrylic on canvas that will be seen again later. The first wall then starts with a painting that “bookends” her early work in watercolour from which you can see the development of use of reflection and shadow that are fundamental to her subsequent work. This wall continues with her larger work on urban scenes in watercolour which shows the increasing use of intense colour, stimulated by New York scenes.
The main east wall shows works on canvas, first some early work in oils followed by the majority painted in acrylic to which she switched in the early 1980s. A part-year back in Chicago in 1985 led to an association with the Joy Horwich Gallery, leading to a one man show in 1989 for which the two dominant canvasses on this wall (and also the two on the left of the wall opposite) were painted. It was in this period that her current style developed, as can be seen on the smaller wall opposite that concentrates on paintings that involve people, where it then extended to works on paper. Regular visits to the United States in the past twenty years have further stimulated her use of bright light and angular buildings to heighten the use of shadow and depth – best exemplified by returning to the sequence of watercolour paintings on the first wall.
The south wall shows the work with which she is currently known, a mix of florals and still lifes. Here, the mixed hanging of the two genres demonstrates a unity of technique and the intertwined use of colour while the small wall opposite shows paintings of similar ilk but smaller in scale.