Courage 2023 Print

Meredith Marsone is a professional artist from New Zealand who has an extensive international exhibition history. Establishing herself as a contemporary figurative painter with a unique and distinctive style Marsone’s work is held in numerous private and notable collections. Her work is part of a new international movement of painting termed ‘disrupted realism’ which explores methods of combining realism and abstraction. She features in the book Disrupted Realism by John Seed along with 37 other artists from around the world. She uses this technique to communicate the subtle emotional qualities in the human experience allowing the viewer to access their own emotional state in response to the work. Her aesthetic combines exquisitely rendered figures with gesturally applied thicker layers of paint. On a conceptual level the abstraction contributes to the emotive quality of the painting whilst also having an underlying meaning for the artist. “I use this technique, which has a way of uniting either the characters in my paintings, or the figure to the surroundings, as a way of visually communicating the spiritual concept of ‘oneness’, that our bodies that seem like our outer most edges are in fact an illusion and we are connected to everything around us.” Stephanie Dixon, Society6 editor writes, “Meredith Marsone’s oil paintings have a haunting familiarity. It’s hard not to see yourself reflected in each eye, lip, and hand. Working in traditional oils, her abstracted photo-realistic depictions express a swath of emotions and human experiences in a subtle and mysterious way.” Her work has also won several awards including First Prize in The Lysaght Watt Art Award 2015, Merit Award Painting and Printmaking Award and selected finalist on five occasions for The Adam Portrait Award. Marsone’s recent solo shows were held in Sydney 2016, Los Angeles 2017, The Millennium Public Art Gallery, NZ 2018 and her work has been exhibited widely in group shows all over the world. Marsone lives in Foxton, New Zealand and runs an open studio and gallery that can be visited by appointment.