Marion Borgelt

Marion Borgelt grew up near Nhill, in the Wimmera district of Victoria. During the 1970s Borgelt trained at the South Australian School of Arts, the Torrens College of Advanced Education and the New York Studio School. During the 1980s, Borgelt taught at the Canberra School of Art and the College of Fine Arts. She was a guest lecturer at University of Newcastle, Macquarie University, Campbelltown City Bicentennial Art Gallery and the Ivan Dougherty Gallery at the University of New South Wales.

Borget was the recipient of the Moet & Chandon Art Fellowship. In 1982 Borgelt participated at the Biennale of Sydney and three years later in Australian Perspecta. Together with Jenny Watson, Borgelt represented Australia at the Sixth Indian Triennale

In 1989 Borgelt won a French government artist's residency and moved to Paris where she lived for the next nine years. While in Paris, Borgelt collaborated with Rene Taze's etching atelier and later on with the printer Fred Genis.

In Paris Borgelt created a large body of work related to the notion of primordial. Her visual explorations of this notion are reflected in the works such as Primordial Logic and Primordial One: Figures F, B, E, A.

In her work Anima/Animus: Splitting Into One No. III, there is a reference to a Jungian theory of the archetypes.[1] Noticeable in these works is the presence of the circle shape, which often occurs in Borgelt's oeuvre. While various shapes have different significance for Borgelt, the circle, as she states," […] embraces to me the most, and the oval too to a certain degree, but the circle seems to represent to me 'totality.' Because the circle is […] a contained thing without […] any tension.".[2]

Borgelt's French palette mainly featured blacks, reds and whites. Victoria Lynn notes of Borgelt's work that, "Energy in her paintings can be as soft as a feather or as turbulent as and fierce as a violent storm."[3]

Borgelt regularly exhibits in Australia and overseas and has held numerous one-person exhibitions. She has also participated in a number of group exhibitions at national and international events. Borgelt has won the Peter Brown Memorial Travelling Art Scholarship, the Dyson Bequest for work and research in Paris and an Australia Council Creative Arts Fellowship. In 1996 Borgelt was the first Australian recipient of the Pollock Krasner Foundation Award.[4]

Borgelt's work features in a number of public and private art collections including the Art Gallery of New South Wales, the National Gallery of Australia, the National Gallery of Victoria, Parliament House Collection, the Powerhouse Museum, University of Sydney, Mornington Peninsula Regional Gallery, Bata Shoe Museum, Limerick City Gallery, Los Angeles County Museum and Auckland Museum of Contemporary Art.

Borgelt's public commissions include a foyer installation Primordial Alphabet and Rhythm for News Limited in Sydney and the commemorative installation Man's Destiny Resides in the Sole for Bata Shoe Museum in Toronto . In 2006 Borgelt had a productive collaboration with Adriano Berengo Glass.

The year 2000 marked a change in Borgelt's palette. The reds that predominated during the 1990s, were now substituted with the choice of yellows, the blues and the purples. Works from this period include Liquid Light: 32 Degrees and Strobe Series No. 6.

Borgelt travels extensively around the world, and the experiences that she gains represent continuous sources of inspiration. Her exhibition Sol y Sombra, for instance, which was held in the Sherman Galleries in Sydney, drew inspiration from her travels to Spain. The natural beauty of her native Australia has also been a strong source of inspiration for Borgelt and it has found its expression in the abstract language of her early works.

Anna Voigt wrote concerning Borgelt's art practice that, “The journey of the spirit and of artmaking are inseparable realities for Marion Borgelt.”.[5] Borgelt's childhood in rural Australia remains integral to her art practice. As for the landscape itself, she "was always both impressed and haunted by the vast flat open space of the Wimmera. In summer it felt like we lived under the sun. It was hot and dusty, wheat fields shimmering as far as the eye could see. It is a place where the earth meets the sky with nothing much in between. There were, of course, the wonderful vernacular structures of the wheat silos, which dotted the horizon. I called them 'The Cathedrals of the Wimmera'. When I was about seventeen, I was desperate to leave.”

• Art of Australia

• Marion Borgelt website