MARILYN HALLAM
Red dress to Delacroix
February 24 - March 22, 2023
Through a career spanning five decades, Marilyn Hallam has consistently produced thoughtful, intelligent painting, reflecting the luminosity and touch of Matisse and Bonnard with the collaged construction of more contemporary painters.
Blackbird Rook
Marilyn Hallam's work is deceptively traditional but on closer inspection you see that the construction, palette and mark-making are extraordinary. The work is full of light and change and intelligence.
"I have always admired and been fascinated by the intricate, slow way that Marilyn builds her paintings. Looking in on her various studios over the years I marvel at the layers of drawing, tracing and photocopying, the collaging and reconstruction that goes on. This exploratory work accumulates and is sifted through, well before she begins to paint on canvas. That is what intrigues me - how her search leads to resolution, her preparation to realisation. The completed paintings are airy, with light flowing through them, and for all their complexity they are vividly direct, immediately radiant.”
Mali Morris, RA London © January 2014
“Motifs recur in Marilyn's work, echoing fascinations that painters have always had - a window that takes the gaze outside, or the mirror that brings space and light. and perhaps a figure, back into a room… There is a double intimacy in these paintings that I find strange and distinctive. The domestic interior; with its array of objects loved and used and looked-at, sets a personal, almost autobiographical tone. But what we also have is a construction in paint on a flat surface, which has involved the artist in a process of intense scrutiny and analysis, thorough, but intent on keeping the painting fresh, alive and luminous. The activity of looking has been questioned, the process of seeing fragmented and re-made, in order to understand more of what painting tells us about painting, at the same time as it tells of the world. What we are shown is a small part of the world, a table top, or a balcony, but the painting of it reaches far into thought and experience. The commitment to breaking down pictorial language and putting it back together again is clearly evident, but not fetishised. It is an exploration, and it has been shared with us.”
Mali Morris, RA London © January 2014
