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Fridge and Mirror
Oil on canvas
54" x 39"
2002 to 2004
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'Marilyn Hallam's perilous search of the unconcealedness of
the painting - art as formal struggle - is rooted in colourism.
She will take a risk, painting with a keen sense of the task she
has set herself'.
Chris Horrocks, Kingston University 1998
'Hallam questions life too closely to be a traditional artist.
At first you think her paintings are domestic interiors; the more
you look at them they seem like universal allegories. Highly recommended'.
Tim Hilton, The Guardian 1991
'Her major aesthetic achievement follows from embedding
this interesting, cognitive architecture of gazes inside an apparently
hedonistic pictorial language, saturated with colour and light,
and activated by rhythmic passages of repeated bar-like brush strokes,
which tend to be offset by more broadly handled areas. As in the
best poetry however, these two forces are combined, and the final,
sensual conviction of Hallam's pictures is enhanced and sustained,
rather than compromised, by their structural and technical complexity'.
David Sweet, Manchester Metropolitan University 1996
'Going into the studio, I could wish that, after all these years,
I had a system or fail-safe mechanism that would allow me to execute
daily portions of work in a finite and cumulative manner. However,
if a painting is satisfactorily resolved, I am always glad that
I do not have this safety-net, though I am slow and timid without
it. I might have made things easier for myself had I not wholeheartedly
subscribed, some years ago, to the delectability but near impossibility
of what Adrian Stokes called 'carved rather than modelled colour'.
I say 'near impossibility' because I have seen, in the work of the
twentieth century's great colourists, that it can be done.
I suspect I am temperamentally unsuited to take the kind of risks
required to keep a painting open and 'revealed' in this way, with
some connection running through from the first action to the last,
but I dislike the painting of obliteration with its studious evidence
of patience and labour, its corrections and deletions of modified
colour.
Nevertheless, I am finding it difficult, so pass me that tube of
white paint and let's get modelling'.
Marilyn Hallam 1998
Marilyn Hallam has been making work and periodically exhibiting
since 1972 when she was generously represented in the exhibition
'Platform 72' at MOMA, Oxford, selected by the young curator, Nicholas
Serota.
© Marilyn Hallam 2008
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