• born in Port-au-Spain, Trinidad in 1943
• immigrated to Montréal, Québec in 1951; parents emigrated from Cologne, Germany ca. 1938; maternal grandparents from Lithuania
• B.A., Concordia University, Montréal, Québec (1975)

click on thumbnails at left to view larger images

Throughout her career, Marion Wagschal has consistently explored the human figure. As a young artist she was concerned with Biblical themes, creating portraits of Biblical figures such as Abraham and Isaac. At the same time what absorbed her were the intimate moments occurring at family gatherings, portraits not of the monumental but of the everyday. The human body is never idealized or romanticized in Wagschal's oeuvre. Her figures are wrinkled, aged and tired, signifying the artist's refusal to adopt the legacy of the Greek and Renaissance ideal of beauty and perfection or contemporary society's obsession with cosmetic perfection. Works such as Backyard (1974) and The Birthday Party (1970) reflect this, depicting with a strong sense of fun the characters that often play in family events. Despite the humour, upon close inspection many of her works contain dark references to the Holocaust and other Jewish history, such as the figures being chased by the German shepherd in The Birthday Party. Although she seeks creative inspiration from models, often friends and acquaintances, her portraits are constructions, wherein reality serves merely as a starting point. As Brian Foss describes in a recent catalogue of her portrait work: "She paints their faces on canvases that are often not large enough to accommodate them completely. She expands beyond their faces to their full, exhausted bodies, setting these in nondescript and shallow spaces that make no pretense of heroicizing their occupants. These full-length figures in particular epitomize the mundane, even the abject . . . . Their fleshy, sagging bodies and aloof eyes transcend their immediacy as specific individuals and tether them--through the communal experience of living in finite, fallible bodies--to our shared knowledge of the limitations and potentialities of being human" (1999). Cyclorama (1988) is a series of self-portraits, which Wagschal sees as reflecting her own various guises and roles in life, relating strongly to Cindy Sherman's "staged" self-portraits (Wagschal, 1999). In 1993 she painted Kiln, part of a series of works that engage with the subject of the Holocaust. Although the kiln can be seen as an ordinary tool for firing clay, the viewer is forced to gaze in this work upon its open mouth, and inside the rage of fire recalls the cremation of bodies during World War II. Wagschal represents the factory of the artist's studio, but she also considers it to be a factory of history and the unconscious mind. Limelight Loom (1993) reflects her knowledge of the history of painting and her desire to produce works which engage in dialogue with artistic precedents, in this case the weavers depicted by Van Gogh. Although there are no human figures in this painting, the human presence is undeniably palpable. According to Rose-Marie Arbour (1994), Wagschal's depiction of a work space reflects the artist’s interest in the theme of human labour and the psychic and physical toll this production takes on its human subjects. Wagschal is a teacher of painting and drawing at Concordia University in Montréal, Québec.

Recent Paintings
University of British Columbia Fine Arts Gallery, Vancouver, British Columbia

Images corps et âmes
372 Ste-Catherine, Montréal, Québec

Of Webern & Identity
Centre culturel Notre-Dame-de-Grace, Montréal, Québec

Cénacle
Belgo Building, Montréal, Québec

Totems, Gods, Goddesses, Demons
Circa Gallery, Montréal, Québec

Série Kompakt
Galerie d'art Lavalin, Montréal, Québec

Jewish Experience in the Arts of the Twentieth Century
Mount Saint Vincent University Art Gallery, Halifax, Nova Scotia

Forum '76
Musée des Beaux Arts, Montréal, Québec

Young Québec Artists
Beckett Gallery, Hamilton, Ontario

Arbour, Rose-Marie. Marion Wagschal: Labeur-toil: dépeindre, peindre encore. Sherbrooke, Québec: Université de Sherbrooke, 1994.

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