Born 1954, Nhill, Victoria

Marion Borgelt is a leading Australian artist with a prodigious career spanning some 30 years. Her work draws inspiration from subjects such as semiotics, language, optics and phenomenology to create atavistic fantasies and mysteries in the forms of painting, sculpture and installation. Her work suggests connections between culture and nature, between the constructed world and the organic world, between microcosm and macrocosm and the duality of light and dark.

A lexicon of symbols and motifs, at once universal and personal, distinguishes the imagery of Borgelt’s work. Drawing on experience with a wide range of materials, including bees-wax, canvas, felt, pigment, stainless steel, wood, stone and organic matter, she hones her ideas to the demands of a given site, mediating the creative intervention with originality and sensitivity.

Marion Borgelt has received many significant art awards. Some of which include: The Harry P Gill Memorial Medal, 1977, as most outstanding final year student, South Australian School of Art; a Peter Brown Memorial Travelling Art Scholarship for study in New York (1979–80) and a fellowship from the French Government for living and working in Paris in 1989, where she consequently spent eight years. Additionally, in 1996, Borgelt was the first Australian artist awarded the prestigious Pollock-Krasner Art Fellowship and in 2001–03 she was the recipient of a two-year Australia Council Fellowship.

Borgelt has undertaken a number of large public and corporate commissions, including a site-specific work for Crown Towers at City of Dreams in Macau and a commemorative sculptural installation for the Bata Shoe Museum, Toronto, entitled Man’s Destiny Resides in the Sole (2005). Borgelt also created Round Up (2005), a site-specific, interactive maze for Shear Outback, Hay, in collaboration with Andrew Crick; Time and Tide (wait for no man), 2004, for J P Morgan Chase, Sydney; Pulse (2001), commissioned by the Australian National University, Canberra, in collaboration with Catherine Donnelley; 55 Ring Maze (2000), at Arthur’s seat, Mornington Peninsula, Victoria and Primordial Alphabet and Rhythm (1999) – a monumental work for News Limited, Sydney.

Marion Borgelt has exhibited extensively in major national and international survey exhibitions and is represented in important art collections in Australia and overseas. 

Marion Borgelt is represented by Dominik Mersch Gallery (NSW) ; and residency artist of Turner Galleries (WA)