Artsy Editorial
Art
5 Artists on Our Radar in July 2023
Jul 5, 2023 2:28PM
“Artists on Our Radar” is a monthly series focused on five artists who have our attention. Utilizing our art expertise and Artsy data, we’ve determined which artists made an impact this past month through new gallery representation, exhibitions, auctions, art fairs, or fresh works on Artsy.
Excerpt:
Margaret R. Thompson
B. 1990, Washington, D.C. Lives and works in Santa Fe, New Mexico.
Margaret R. Thompson’s misty, narrative paintings offer a sense of balance—between fantasy and reality; landscape and interiors; figuration and abstraction; calm and excitement. The Santa Fe–based artist’s soft, entrancing scenes are painted in wispy washes of color, built up from an array of materials including oil paint, wax, sand, turmeric, raw pigments, and earth, among others. In the resulting works, figures melts into their environs or a natural landscape hums with life, conveying the artist’s interests in the sacred, dreams, and otherworldly life.
“In my paintings, enigmatic beings, like phantoms, protect boxes holding mysteries, ride motorcycles by Eden’s gates in a blue canyon, ascend to outer heaven above a flaming staircase, and dive for pearls in a half human half moon body,” Thompson wrote in her artist statement. Her works are imbued with her background in anthropology and hints of magical realism and Symbolism, as well as her experiences living in Northern California, the Yucatán, and the New Mexico desert.
The artist described her latest works, now featured in a two-person exhibition titled “Eidolon” at Tyger Tyger Gallery in Asheville, North Carolina, as being “about sanctuary—hideaways and refuge, moments of concealment, protection… sanctuary as a place, a way of life, a disguise, a state of being.”
Thompson is also currently featured in a group exhibition, “Reverdie,” at Arusha Gallery in Edinburgh, and will be in a three-person exhibition at its London location this November. The artist has been featured in dozens of other exhibitions across the world in the past two years, including at Red Arrow Gallery, Wilder Gallery, and Duran Mashaal.
—Casey Lesser