Marguerite Horner

My practice is concerned with the non-material, a reality we can access through contemplation and painting…Jung asserts that ‘the experience of the Sacred and Holy is a fundamental requirement of the self. To deny it brings spiritual decay; to embrace it illuminates the soul with meaning’.
Today the moving image dominates our world and whilst visually powerful in so many respects, it denies us the opportunity for stillness and reflection. The value of a painting lies in its ability to induce a contemplative state in the viewer. As Walter Benjamin says ‘before it the spectator can abandon himself to his associations.’
For me, the value of contemplation lies in its ability to reconcile the heart and the mind into one. I’m inspired by Merleau-Ponty’s observation that it is ‘precisely because painting does not ‘copy’ things, and because it does not offer things to thought as does science but presents them immediately and bodily, in their depth and movement, that painting gives a true sense of the world and what it means to see it.’
Through my work I’m interested in enquiring into the ways in which man may be related to the infinite. Upon the framework of this enquiry my paintings aim to investigate, amongst other things, notions of transience, intimacy, loss and hope. I use the external world as a trigger or metaphor for these experiences and through a period of gestation and distillation, I make a series of intuitive decisions that lead the work towards completion.
‘For the only equivalent for the universe within is the universe without’  Jung

Biography
Marguerite Horner graduated with an MA in Fine Art from City&Guilds in 2004 and won the Kidd Rapinet prize for outstanding degree work. She’s since exhibited widely in Art Fairs and many Group Shows including the Royal Academy Summer Exhibition, The ING Discerning Eye and the Royal Institute of Painters in Watercolour.
In 2011 Marguerite exhibited at the 54th Venice Biennale and again in 2019 she exhibited at the 58th Venice Biennale. In 2012 Marguerite’s first London solo Exhibition ‘The Seen and Unseen’‘ was at The Pitzhanger Manor Gallery. In 2017 Horner won the NOA17 MS Amlin Prize. In 2018 Horner won the British Women Artist Award and has been shortlisted for the Ruskin Prize (2019) and the Trinity Buoy Wharf Drawing Prize (2018). In 2018 examples of her work were acquired by the Yale Centre for British Art, USA. Her paintings are also in a number of private and museum collections in England, USA and China. In 2024 a book on her work ‘Numinous‘ was published by Hurtwood Press.