MARIANNE GERLINGER: "New Works," To May 21, 2013, Jarvis Hall Fine Arts, Calgary

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Marianne Gerlinger

Marianne Gerlinger

MARIANNE GERLINGER: New Works

To May 21, 2013

Jarvis Hall Fine Arts, Calgary

By Thomas E. Hardy

Longtime painter Marianne Gerlinger has exhibited throughout Alberta and as far away as Slovenia. Before living in Calgary, she lived in Florida. When lining up her latest paintings, she noticed that they seemed to suggest passageways. “Even the painting Coil takes you into the distance,” she says, noting that other works have cave-like areas. “There’s one that’s an ice hole … yes, you’re going through this portal – interesting, I didn’t realize I was proceeding in this way.” Interesting indeed. Then she recalls how this would have begun with someone sending her an old copy of Dante’s Inferno, and wonders if the paintings are “all the rings I am going through.” Her epiphany compounds the mysterious terrain that is the open-ended setting for her work. Even if paintings have a literary reference, it is not too specific, she says. “Otherwise, it does become illustration as opposed to an experience.” Coil has many references: Hamlet’s timeless soliloquy (‘when we have shuffled off this mortal coil’) as well as Eden and the serpent. But lyrically empowering them is the imaginative verve of an abstract blue swirl of paint coiled within a black embryonic vessel, emerging to explore rich verdant life set at a distance. The ‘fruit’ of this action is left open. This projection through figurative portals into an undefined future represents the shared theme of this new body of work.