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JULIAN BELL (writer and artist) writes on Marguerite Horners work...

"Marguerite Horner performs a simple, ancient but profound trick with her paintings. She takes a sheet of primed canvas or paper and makes it glow as if lit from within. Physically, the white is no more white than it was before she touched it, but spiritually it is transformed. The markings Horner makes serve not so much to represent views of the world around us, as to activate what lies behind them a quality not to be named, only touched on. A walk in the open with a camera has presented her with an epiphany, some angle of approach on whatever is real."
"This is an airy, untrammelled pictorial world. The street and its concerns have been left behind. Colours have been left behind, almost - or rather, it is as if we were looking into a pure glow that is the sum of all pure colours. These skies and seas and trees are ghostly, if we read 'ghost' in its old spiritual sense. And yet there is a material particularity to each of Horner's large and arresting canvases."
"Often a cunning interplay of divergent pigments only reveals itself in a doubletake. There is an equal cunning to her compositional stragegies - the daring imbalances of above and below, the barriers she throws across the act of vision. Those barriers - ripples, branches, clouds - become flowing calligraphic performances. This is committed oil painting, and full of the medium's pleasures. It comes from a painter who has considered her aesthetic options carefully, having secured a wide-ranging technical command."
"There are many ways one might set Horner's act in context: where I encountered her work, the talk would have been about photo-painters like Gerhard Richter. I think of her more as an English individualist, and a distinctively northern one: her light-flecked thickets put me in mind of the late 19th-century painter Atkinson Grimshaw.



Julian Bell is the son of critic Quentin Blake and author of 'What is Painting' and 'Mirror of the World, A New History of Art'

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CRITICS CHOICE by Jane Neal ( critic and curator)


Bleached-out landscapes, monochrome skies and moonlit seas make up the sensitive and evocative practice of London-based artist Marguerite Horner. But while the sublime skyscape Awakening and the evocative landscape The Valley of the Shadow are beautifully rendered in oil or charcoal on paper, and delivered on a scale sufficiently large and dramatic as to reinforce Horner's technical virtuosity, the most successful works on the Your Gallery website are the eerie If she does not listen and To be where you really are. Mysterious but understated, they draw in the viewer to a world which Horner has succeeded in making convincingly real and uncomfortably uncanny. The wintry branches in If she does not listen distract our attention from the wood beyond, forcing us to pause and focus on what is immediately before us, as though we were being abruptly halted by a physical blockage on a woodland path. A similar ploy is at work in To be where you really are, where a picturesque white house is half obscured by a thick hedge and trees. Horner is adept at enticing and frustrating the viewer in a manner reminiscent of Northern European Romantic painters, such as Casper David Friedrich - so perhaps she should omit the line of explanation she has included to accompany each work. She doesn't need them - the paintings command sufficient time and attention from the viewer to lead them to draw their own conclusions - and the sense of mystery adds to their charm. Jane Neal


Jane Neal is an Oxford-based freelance journalist and critic. Her special focus over the past year has been the developing art scene in Central and Eastern Europe. She contributes to a wide variety of international art publications.
2009: Jane Neal becomes the Artistic Director of CALVERT 22.

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Light from Light

2005
oil on canvas
122.5 x 92cm

The Speed of Time

2006
oil on canvas
50 x50cm

Awakening

2004
oil on canvas
180 x 132cm

To be where you really are

2006
oil on canvas
92 x 122.5cm

Valley of the Shadow

2004
oil on canvas
180 x 132cm

Faith pours from your walls

2004
oil on canvas
152 x 182cm

'Until She Listens'

2006
oil on canvas
50 x50cm

Ever Deeper

2004
oil on canvas
182 x 152 cm

Living in the Imagination of others

2006
oil on canvas
50 x 50 cm

The State of Becoming

2006
oil on canvas
50x50cm

Sideways Look

2007
oil on canvas
50x50cm

Breeze of Comfort

2006
oil on canvas
50x50cm

Roses and Thorns

2008
oil on canvas
50x50cm

magnolia madness

2008
oil on canvas
50x50cm

in the woods

2008
oil on canvas
50x50cm

The Insubstantial Man

2006
oil on canvas
50 x 50 cm

Tangled up in Grey

2008
oil on canvas
50x50cm

Walled in by feelings

2007
oil on canvas
92x122cm

Provokes my Tenderness

2005
oil on canvas
122x92cm