Marion Arnold
Born in London, England, 1947
Lives in Cape Town, South Africa

Training:
1968:BA:University of Natal, Pietermaritzburg, South Africa
1969:BAFA:University of Natal, Pietermaritzburg, South Africa
1978:BA [Hons History of Art]:University of South Africa
1981:MA:University of South Africa, Pretoria, South Africa
1988:D.Litt et Phil:University of South Africa

Recent group exhibitions:
1992: Pretoria Painters and Sculptors: 1963-1993
1992: Looking at Art:Looking at Watercolour
1991: Decade of Young Artists

Recent one artist exhibitions:
1993: "Situations": The Goodman Gallery
1990: "Boundaries": The Goodman Gallery
1985: "Encounters": [tour]

Recent articles or books written on the artist's work:
1990: Alexander, L and Cohen,E [eds] '150 South African Painters:Past
and Present, Cape Town,
Struik.
1989: Hitge, M., "Marion Arnold's Paradoxical Intentions",
In Art, No.3, Feb 1989.

Marion Arnold has a strong commitment to feminism...Inevitably
this interest has a definite influence on her work which is
evident in the content and inherent purpose of much of her
iconography. She frequently makes a deliberate choice of
items made by women, many of which recur regularly in her paintings...

In this way the artist attempts to redress the wrongs
perpetrated against female art-makers for so many centuries
by male "elitist" art historians who dismissed many things
of ... sound aesthetic value because they happened to be made by women.

By also refusing to accept prescribed male attitudes concerning
the way art ought to be executed, Marion Arnold restores a
balance, and her observations on the subject are conveyed
with the clarity ... of searingly acute insight:


An apposite example is the visually and metaphorically
densely-textured work "Divinely appointed the property of
Ladies" ... Literary and feminist aspects clearly have their
say when one considers the clever title which ... was taken
from a comment made by a woman and recorded in
a woman's art journal in 1868, which states that still life
painting was "Divinely appointed the property of Ladies". The
hippo was made by a female potter, and so, obviously, was
the white crochet work which forms the inner
border of the painting.The mirror with its feminine but
"false" flowers, and the hippo with her "real" ones and her
beaded necklace, further extend the
feminist references with the additional clout of a lot of play on reality,
illusion, and duality. The metaphors are extended further into the banal paper
packets which are acquired when women do their shopping...
Excerpt from Hitge, M. 'Marion Arnold's Paradoxical Intentions: Some influences
on her Work' in Art No 3 Februry 1989 pp 30-31.