Marilyn Borglum

Biography

Born in 1962 in Minneapolis, Minnesota, Marilyn Borglum is a contemporary painter occupied with human vulnerability and the trait of projection. Her moody and predominantly figurative works—using acrylic paint on canvas or charcoal on paper—question the discrepancy between reality and our perception of reality.

Marilyn Borglum was almost born with a pencil or paintbrush in her hand. Her family endorsed her interest in drawing at a very young age. Her grandmother Marion Ewald and her grandmother’s uncles Gutzon and Solon Borglum were all professional artists. In doing so, at the age of just four years old, she was emulating Leonardo Da Vinci’s drawings of horses.

These equine works would play an important role throughout her career. However, her most important and compelling body of works is deeply personal. Her explicit imagery, which can often be moody or disturbing, uses figuration and forms as metaphors — or rather symbolic constructions — to unravel, disentangle and examine life, our vulnerability, and more.

Marilyn Borglum often selects identifiable subjects through intriguing parallels and various analogies for meaning within her paintings. Think of political or notorious people, raising awareness for specific behavioral patterns. In a way, she confronts the viewer with our behavioral patterns or parallels of our own lives before tempering the weight of the image and the confrontation for the viewer with both sarcasm and beauty.

From a visual perspective, her painterly practice is strongly inspired and influenced by masters such as Willem de Kooning, Francis Bacon and Ben Shahn. With every work, the American artist is searching for the ideal degree of execution, in which the form expresses the emotion from within by bold and unique painterly interventions. Think of her mark-making within the pictures. The organic lines have traces within her childhood drawings, resulting in an almost lyrical dance of different realities.

Career Facts

Marilyn Borglum studied at Colorado State University from 1980. She enrolled as a veterinary pre-med student but switched to the studio arts — painting, to be more specific — after a year before achieving her BFA in painting in 1984. Five years later, she would return to her university to study printmaking and earned her MFA in painting, strongly influenced by printmaking, in 1993.

With the turn of the millennium, the American painter became severely ill. As a result, Marilyn Borglum was unable to paint from 2000 until 2004. She experienced extreme chemical sensitivities, weakness, and even life-threatening symptoms. Though largely recovered, these events would strongly impact her painterly practice, not only from a production point of view, but also concerning her subject matter and visual research.

Marilyn Borglum has exhibited at numerous national and international art galleries.

Artworks

Last Updated on August 16, 2023