From her Melbourne studio, Linda Marrinon courts the strange, the disproportionate and the supremely off-trend to forge something closer to the sublime.

By Peter Hill NOV 2014

I’m convinced that in 50 years’ time, people – the academy, fellow artists, the populace at large – will look back on Linda Marrinon as one of the most significant artists of her generation. Not just in Australia, but worldwide. There is a sublime weirdness to her work. This perverse turn is best broached by Chris McAulliffe, writing in his 2007 monograph on the artist Linda Marrinon: let her try, when he proposes the core of Marrinon’s work to rest “in her ability to be simultaneously out of whack and on song”. Her exhibition next year, at Monash University Museum of Art (MUMA), curated by Charlotte Day, will only secure this admirable position.

I first came across Marrinon’s work in 1984, when I had a painting studio at the Cite Internationale des Arts in Paris. It was a few years before my first trip to Australia, but I was a loyal subscriber to the great Art Network magazine, published and edited by Ross Wolfe in Sydney. I still remember ripping open the envelope and pulling out a particular edition that featured on its cover a Marrinon painting depicting a young woman carrying a cross on her back, crawling across an orange and green landscape. The words “MISUNDERSTANDING” and “PREJUDICE” were written across the arms of the cross. It was quintessentially of its time. Typical of painting’s grand hurrah in the early 1980s, known variously as neo-expressionism, the trans-avant-garde or simply “bad painting”. The parameters of this movement were set variously, and... Subscribe to read this article in full