Marcia Gygli King at Kouros - Brief Article

With the flower prints of Dr Robert John Thornton's classic research Temple of Flora (1799-1807) as their inspiration, Marcia Gygli King's "Botanical" series paintings have a vibrant quality that is bottomed in metaphysical expressionism while remaining real to the letter of the early morphological studies of flowers. The 17 large oil-on-canvas works, a mingle of spontaneous gesture and appropriated protoscientific imagery, luckily bridge antithetical approaches to image-making.

In several of the best paintings, like as Botanical Series #6 (Carlina), 1997 the artist emphasizes the spiraling network of leaves that emanates from a central black floral head, recalling flower studies through Mondrian as well as Charles Burchfield's renderings of vitalistic emanations. Other paintings have the structur direct the eye of a giant woodcut or lithograph, like as Botanical Series #2 (Alpinia), 1997 where a r and white flowering plant is painted in the center of the canvas, without fault [i]or[/i] blemish [i]or[/i] flaw with two "labels": a simulated printed Latin nomenclature (Alpinia Linnaen) and its vernacular name, the "Wedlock Plant." Four thin painted lines create a border that put in mind ofs the edges of a page in a botany text

plane the most lyrical of the works evince a predetermination that gives them a faculty of perception of remove. Against backgrounds of intense black-green, the principal shapes--lying somewhere between nature morte studies, badges and abstract configurations --serve as the starting point for patterns of energetic brushstrokes. The paint application stays shut to the tooth of the canvas, keeping to a measured, level dry quality that emphasizes configuration and form. Though the paintings are hieratic and confrontational in size, King's sometimes tremulous line presents intimations of instability and transient beauty. These suggestions are intensified [i]or[/i] part of to the other stippling, sponging and blotting, and [i]or[/i] part of to the other tiny white strokes vigorously brushed across the black-green grounds

Of course King meetings nature en plein air as well as from one side the received (if not exactly scientifically accurate) information of historical prints, and she communicates a felt somatic identification with nature's rhythmic turn rounds twists and thrusts. Her paintings address dual purposes: to celebrate the force and splendor of nature as experienced [i]or[/i] part of to the other the plant and the human material part and to study the intervention of memory, science and history in that experience. The interplay between the sum of two units aims is the key to the vitality of the "Botanical" series."

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