Lorna Marsh

Lorna Marsh (1949-2022) was born in Cape Town, South Africa. Her early art instruction included courses with visiting professors from the Royal Academy, and she also studied at the Art Institute of Chicago. In her youth she was a stage actress and model, and she lived on three continents; her work was shaped by many influences but above all by the human condition, animals and cartoons, and by her African childhood. She was represented by the Aldo Castillo Gallery from 2000 and is regarded as one of the most important female artists of her time.

Marsh was a figurative expressionist whose work is most closely aligned with German Expressionism and Surrealism and is also informed by Robert Motherwell, Cy Twombly and Antoni Tàpies. She had a love of line that can be seen in almost all her work, and her surfaces are complex and layered, often applied directly by hand rather than with a brush, in acrylic, oil stick, graphite, wood stains and varnishes, collage and a wide variety of other media on paper, canvas, wood and clayboard. She described the approach as a mark within a mark. Working across intimate and monumental scales, she varied her palette to intensify the tensions she sought to explore, and her classical discipline gave her the command of materials to make her hands the tools of application, with nothing lying between the artist and her surface.

Her powerful, emotive and at times confrontational works address humanity's destructive relationship with itself, with nature and with others. Animals and nature are potent metaphors in her vocabulary, demanding philosophical, political and ecological reflection while resisting literal translation, and her underlying message remained clear: we are encroaching upon the natural world, and the consequences may be irreversible. Her animal paintings, largely drawn from her native South Africa, have a hallucinatory intensity and convey the movement and countermovement of African herd animals such as wild dogs, hyenas and baboons, creatures she prized for their endurance, freedom and rough-hewn dignity, the antithesis of commercially cute Disney animals. In her figure paintings the face is often partly or fully expunged, and the female nudes are distorted for emotional impact. The critic Robert P. Metzger, in his essay Creatures of the Earth, called her paintings cautionary tales that argue for courageous individuality and speak to both heart and brain, and noted that even her most brutal pictures contain a flicker of what Wordsworth called the still sad music of humanity.

Marsh worked in series, among them Man is the Trap Against Nature (steel-jaw lion traps), Tethered Flight (kingfisher, sparrow hawk and kestrel bound by string), Cage (muzzled animals), Shrouded Visions (draped people, animals and landscapes), Africa Within (scavengers: jackal, hyena, dog, baboon, lion and vulture), Discarded Landscapes (ecological warnings), I am the Choicemaker (Eve in the Garden of Eden) and Firebirds (a conflagration of birds), as well as Butterflies, Western Dress and other series of wildlife, female figures, landscapes and flowers. The Cage Paintings are a meditation on the ways our actions marginalize nature: collaged red devices pasted onto delicately lined animals enact the caging process, muzzled lions and wild dogs suggest an upended balance of predator and prey, rabbits are imprisoned by Easter iconography, and the dehorned rhinoceros shows how even protection can compromise the animal. In the Western Dress paintings of 2013 a veiled woman's eyes are placed on the fabric of her gown, so that the garment becomes the object of observation and judgment, a critique of the expectations placed on women.

Marsh exhibited throughout the world, in solo shows in South America, Spain, the United States and South Africa and in group shows in Italy and the United States, including solo exhibitions at the Florida Museum of Hispanic and Latin American Art in Miami, the Jacobo Borges Museum in Caracas, the Real Monasterio de Santa Maria de la Valldigna, Fundació Jaume II el Just, in Valencia, the João Ferreira Gallery in Cape Town and the Aldo Castillo Gallery in Chicago, and at the Shanghai Art Fair. Her work is held in corporate and private collections in Germany, where she had a strong following, Canada, the United States and South America.