The feminist painter's bold oeuvre comes to life in a new exhibition celebrating Canada's leading female artists
Located in London’s historic Trafalgar Square, opposite the National Gallery, is Canada House Gallery, a space dedicated to highlighting the work of Canadian artists such as Jeff Wall and Edward Burtynsky, who both exhibited there in 2015. This year, the gallery is launching a series of shows celebrating female Canadian artists, beginning with the bold feminist painter Marion Wagschal who has been painting for five decades, yet is relatively unknown outside of North America. “I think it’s great that Canadian women artists will be seen at this venue,” Wagschal told AnOther, “there are so many challenging artists who open up discussions about uncanny and hybrid perspectives on life.”
Wagschal’s own perspective is predominantly concerned with the many facets of time. Her large-scale portraits span infinite years and betray memories she has collected and embellished using objects and mementos from her personal and collective history. Much like artist Louise Bourgeois, her paintings are an analysis of her identity in the context of family. The daughter of Holocaust survivors, Wagschal emigrated from Trinidad to Canada with her parents in 1951. This early displacement and her parents stories lend her work a sadness that is tempered by her enthusiasm for the power of life-force. Her images bleed nostalgia and emotion, in her own words, they’re: “urgent, confessional, libidinal, scary, painful and tender.”
Wagschal studied art at Montreal’s Concordia University where she favoured portraiture and figurative painting at a time when her contemporaries were exploring abstraction. After graduating, she taught painting and drawing at Concordia’s Fine Arts Faculty for an impressive 37 years, introducing the innovative course Women and Painting during her time there. Previously featured in the Art and Feminism show at Montreal’s Contemporary Art Museum, Wagschal has also shown in Germany and USA, and last year enjoyed her first major retrospective at the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts. Marion Wagschal will be her first solo UK show, featuring 13 paintings completed between 1980 and 2015. Here, she sheds light on her creative process, the importance of establishing emotive connections and her ever-evolving aesthetic...
On how her Canadian identity informs her art...
"I do identify with Canada in its most ideal incarnation: a place where the notion still exists of retaining complex affiliations while still remaining staunchly Canadian. In my painting, there is a strong connection to the history of European painting, especially the human figure and the nude. More significantly the melancholy that is noticeably present in my work is an aspect of diaspora."
On whether painting is akin to therapy...
"I am interested in things that are present but unspoken, like painting itself – something deeply felt and powerful. I believe when women describe their experience through art we get a more complete picture. Is this therapy? I am not sure, although making an image that voices what I am trying to say gives me great satisfaction."
On the objects that take form in her latest works...
"In Burning Spoons I used a box of spoons, one of the few objects my mother took with her from Germany and a wedding present from her parents who died in Auschwitz. The burning spoons are a reference to the burning of Jews. In the painting, my mother and myself are literally in bed together – there is intimacy but also tension. It is an example of personal and collective history coming together."
On how voyeurism and intimacy plays into her work...
"There is complicity between my models and myself. I spend a lot of time on the larger paintings, and we are together sometimes for months. It’s labour-intensive. There is a lot of back and forth as I work, but it is often the sitter who elucidates the scene. Sometimes I think empathy is listening. Stories and comments direct the painting to some degree – colour choices, brush strokes, etc. Others are totally silent, if they prefer that.
As for voyeurism, I like to look, and unlike Chauncey Gardner in the movie Being There with Peter Sellers, I don’t like to watch."
On why she frequently casts nudes...
"Bodies are my water lilies, my gardens of earthly delights and fears. The body is a kind of battlefield where struggles for survival - political, physical, environmental, psychological – are waged. The body is a map of a life lived."
On why her paintings predominantly focus on the female form...
"I did have the feeling that women’s experience and subjectivity was largely absent. In Cyclops I did a self-portrait in the nude in which I am the subject of the gaze as well as the object. The painting references self-portraits by Rembrandt, Goya, Corot and others. I painted myself larger-than-life as if I were an old master with a pin-curl in my hair. I like to insert myself into art history in different genres as a kind of irritant."
On what advice she would give to aspiring artists...
"To be open to everything, to look around, to read, to listen, to talk, to re-examine what they are told and where it came from and to survive."
On how it feels to gain acclaim for her work at a later point in her career...
"It’s wonderful to disseminate a lifetime of painting to a wider audience with many different contexts and reactions. It’s extremely generative, and I am open to taking on other challenges and possibilities."
Marion Wagschal is at the Canada House Gallery from February 5 – April 15, 2016.
