Marilyn Holsing
Marilyn Holsing: On Longing
Opening Reception: Saturday, February 14, 1 - 4 pm
On View: February 13 - March 14
Location: Gross McCleaf Gallery, The Mill Studios, 123 Leverington Ave, Philadelphia, PA
Visitor parking is located in The Mill Studios lot, accessible from Leverington Avenue.
___
Artist Interview Available: Art Sync | Abundance: Conversation with Marilyn Holsing
Exposed, Oil on canvas over panel, 14" x 11"
About the Artist
Marilyn Holsing lives and works in Philadelphia. She has exhibited her work in numerous solo and group exhibitions throughout the Mid-Atlantic region and beyond, including, The Delaware Contemporary in Wilmington, Delaware; Melanee Cooper Gallery in Chicago; Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge; the ICA at the University of Pennsylvania and Field Projects, New York. Her work is included in public collections such as the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, the Woodmere Art Museum and the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and Fidelity Investments. She is Professor Emerita in painting at Tyler School of Art at Temple University in Philadelphia.
___
“An Ohioan by birth, I have lived and worked in the Philadelphia area for decades, moving here to teach at Tyler School of Art after graduate school. My undergraduate degree (BFA) is from the Ohio State University and my graduate degree (MA) is from the University of New Mexico. I retired as Professor of Painting a few years ago, but I have continued to work in the studio in a variety of media. My practice has branched out into new directions, such as dioramas, while continuing my commitment to painting.
In these years I have lived in the city followed by a move to the suburbs. One of the joys of life in the suburbs is the opportunity to garden. Not only do I grow flowers and shrubs, but I like re-designing the plantings, interests that reveal themselves in my studio work.”
Formality, Oil on canvas over panel, 24" x 18"
Gross McCleaf Gallery is pleased to present On Longing, a new solo exhibition by Marilyn Holsing.
In this body of work, Holsing begins each painting with a colored ground of layered hues, building from that base until flora, tendrils, and shadowy environments take shape.
Influenced by her work with dioramas and glass cloches, she studies how light reflects, distorts, and obscures, and how a surface can both reveal and conceal what lies within.
Holsing’s recent work grew out of an exploration of bell jars, objects that both protect and confine.
In earlier dioramas, she encased sculptural figures within glass vessels, observing how reflections fracture space and alter perception.
“Encasing these things in glass highlights their preciousness and their need to be protected from everyday life,” she explains. The paintings extend this investigation, imagining landscapes within containers and testing how interior and exterior space collapse into one another.
The cloche becomes both vessel and boundary, a space in which life feels suspended or, in author Susan Stewart’s words, “arrested.” What appears delicate is deliberately set apart and made significant through its detachment.
Veranda, Oil on linen over panel, 30" x 24"
Rather than constructing a fixed storyline, Holsing allows the painting itself to guide her decisions.
“My earlier Young Marie work directed the narrative,” Holsing notes, “whereas with this work the narrative is open-ended and implied.”
Forms press against their boundaries, reflections interrupt depth, and the space inside often feels denser than the room that surrounds it.
Drawing inspiration from Rococo painters, Dutch forest still lifes, and botanical illustration, Holsing embraces density and visual abundance.
Without a preordained plan, she works through revision and response, allowing shapes, colors, and textures to interact until a narrative begins to take form.
The resulting paintings hold tension between containment and expansion, surface and depth, inviting viewers to linger within their suspended worlds.
