17 – 21 March
The body of work featuring in Marguerite Horner’s forthcoming solo show at Bermondsey Project Space spans the last ten years of her artistic career, which culminated in 2018 when Horner won the British Women Artist Award. The most recent paintings included in the exhibition were produced in 2019 during a two-week residency the artist was invited to take part in at Nanxi Academy of Arts in Wenzhou, China.
The title for the exhibition came from Philippians, 4:7: ‘And the peace of God, which transcends all understanding, will guard your hearts and your minds in Christ Jesus’. The artist practice reflects ‘the reality of this, as part of someone’s being in spite of them living in dire circumstance, or going through a bad experience…. ‘. For Horner, that passage is echoed in the observation Viktor Frankl had noted in his 1946 book called ‘Man’s Search For Meaning’ on his experiences as a prisoner in Nazi concentration camps during WW2. ‘If there is a meaning in life at all’, he suggested, ‘then there must be a meaning in suffering. Suffering is an ineradicable part of life, even as fate and death. Without suffering and death, human life cannot be complete.’ He added that ‘everything can be taken from a man but one thing: the last of human freedoms – to choose one’s attitude in any given set of circumstances, to choose one’s own way.
