Beauty and Dread: Marion Wagschal's Cyclops and Other Tales

An Evening With Marion Wagschal at The National Gallery Of Canada 

Tales from the Schwarzwald as Told by My Mother, 1980-2013, Marion Wagschal 

Friday evening at the National Gallery of Canada opened Marion Wagschal: Cyclops and Other Tales — the Montréal painter's first exhibition at the NGC, and a survey that the artist herself described as covering five decades of work. 

The gallery was packed. Phones and cameras balanced on catalogue pamphlets, curator Anaïs Castro moving through clusters of guests before the talk began. Wagschal herself, small and sharp-eyed, took the floor with none of the caution you sometimes get from an artist facing a room full of people. She just started talking.

Who Is Marion Wagschal

For anyone encountering her for the first time, it's worth backing up.

Wagschal was born in 1943 in Port of Spain, Trinidad and Tobago — an unlikely starting point for a career that would become so identified with Montréal. Her parents were German Jews who had fled Cologne in 1939, one step ahead of catastrophe, and rebuilt a life in the Caribbean before the family emigrated again, this time to Montréal, when Marion was eight. That doubled displacement — a family already once uprooted, then uprooted again — sits underneath a lot of what she paints, even when the subject in front of you is something as ordinary as a body or two in a bed, or a simple self portrait. 

She trained first as a teacher, earning a diploma from Macdonald College at McGill in 1962, and didn't complete her Bachelor of Fine Arts until 1975, at Sir George Williams University — the school that would soon become Concordia. She then spent the next 37 years on the other side of the easel, teaching painting and drawing at Concordia, where she built a seminar called Women and Painting that quietly shaped a generation of the city's women artists. It's not incidental biography. It's the root of the line she delivered last night almost as an aside — that "women artists who know about women artists, paint better". She's been making that argument, in one form or another, for decades.

As a painter, Wagschal came up at a moment when Canadian art history still gave the prestige seat to abstraction, and she planted herself in figuration anyway — unfashionably, and then influentially. Critics have long placed her alongside painters like Alice Neel, Marlene Dumas, Lucian Freud, and Francis Bacon: artists drawn to the body not as an idealized form but as something raw, aging, marked, occasionally grotesque, always honest.

But the two names she claims most directly as her own touchstones are Egon Schiele and James Ensor, and it's worth dwelling on why. From Schiele she takes the contorted, unguarded body — the willingness to bend a figure past the point of comfort in order to get at something more truthful than an anatomically correct pose could offer. It's there in the way her subjects twist toward or away from the viewer, limbs and torsos pushed into positions that read as psychological before they read as physical. From Ensor, the Belgian painter of masks and carnival processions, she takes something stranger: the grotesque as costume rather than deformity. 

The Melancholy of Carnivores, 2014, Marion Wagschal

That Ensorian streak is on full display in one of the show's most arresting canvases, The Melancholy of Carnivores, 2014. A fox and a pale, hulking dog loom over a seated nude figure whose face is obscured by what reads as an animal mask, while a second nude crouches nearby and a cluster of clothed onlookers gathers in the background, half-watching, half-complicit. The wall text frames it as a meditation on the ethics of eating meat — Wagschal's own uneasy position between needing to eat and recoiling from what that requires — and the masked and hybrid figures build a kind of suspended tension that pulls in everyone looking at the canvas, not just the figures inside it. It's a very Ensor move: turn the viewer into a member of the crowd, implicated rather than safely outside the frame. 

Burning Spoons, 1993, Marion Wagschal

Equally, her work returns often to family, to the Holocaust's long shadow over her parents' generation, and to the female figure as something closer to an archive than a subject — a place where personal history and inherited history sit on top of each other. This is where her "double gaze of trauma" line stops being an abstraction and becomes something you can point to on the wall. Burning Spoons, 1993 shows Wagschal seated on a bed beside her mother, a box of silver spoons burning quietly between them — the sole heirloom her mother carried out of Europe fleeing the war, transformed by the flames into an emblem of memory and exile. 

Tales from the Schwarzwald as Told by My Mother, 1980–2013 (the first work featured in this post), a work she returned to across more than three decades, draws on the Black Forest folk tales her mother told her as a child, stories that became a lifeline back to a cultural inheritance the family's displacement had otherwise severed — myth and memory converging, in the museum's own phrase, rather than staying safely apart. And Dottore, 2009 (seen below), turns a hospice visit to her dying brother into a crowded, theatrical scene, the attending figures masked with the beaked plague masks of historical physicians while their mother lies in bed in the background — three generations of women, in effect, folded into one sickroom.

Dottore, 2009, Marion Wagschal

Taken together, the three paintings make a case for what "inherited" trauma actually looks like on canvas: not a single wound reenacted, but objects, stories, and deathbeds passed from mother to daughter until it's no longer clear where the mother's grief ends and the daughter's begins. It's the clearest possible illustration of the eye she described as turned inward at the artist talk — the one trained not on the world in front of her but on everything her family carried into it. 

A major retrospective, Marion Wagschal: Portraits, Memories, Fables, organized by Sarah Fillmore for the Art Gallery of Nova Scotia, travelled to the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts in the mid-2010s and introduced her to a wider national audience. She's shown at Canada House in London, at the Musée de Joliette, and is represented by Battat Contemporary in Montreal. She's a member of the Royal Canadian Academy of Arts, and her paintings sit in the collections of the Musée d'art contemporain de Montréal, the Musée des beaux-arts de Montréal, and the Robert McLaughlin Gallery in Oshawa, among others.

All of which is to say: by the time she got to the NGC last night, this wasn't a debut. It was closer to a homecoming, decades overdue.

Beauty and Dread

The line that anchored the whole evening was hers: her work, she said, "lives in the perfect balance between beauty and dread." Stand in front of any of the paintings in this show and you feel it immediately — a domestic scene, a body, a familiar face, rendered with a tenderness that never quite resolves into comfort. The dread isn't an intrusion into the beauty. It's structural. It's the thing holding the composition together.

The Cyclops

Cyclopes, 1972, Marion Wagschal

The exhibition's title comes from a recurring figure in Wagschal's work: the cyclops. She traced it back through art history — the one-eyed men who show up as oddities, monsters, footnotes. And then she turned the image on its side. To be a woman working in a man's world, she said, is its own kind of one-eyed condition: one eye trained outward on the world as it presents itself, the other turned inward, inherited. A double gaze of trauma — yours, or someone else's, handed down without your consent.

She brought up Artemisia Gentileschi's Judith (paintings) almost as a companion piece across four centuries — a reminder that women painting women as monstrous, as powerful, as dangerous, is not a new project. It's an old one that keeps needing to be restarted.

"Monsters," she said, "are a literary invention — or, in this case, an artistic one." She described herself as "her own type of little monster." And then, without missing a beat: "I am not a bystander in my own paintings." That line landed hard in the room. It's not a small claim. It's a rejection of the passive female subject entirely — the woman who is looked at rather than looking.

On Craft

She was just as direct about the making of the work as the meaning of it. Asked about her process, she offered something close to a manifesto: "women artists who know about women artists, paint better." Lineage matters. Knowing who came before you changes what you're capable of putting on the canvas — it's the same conviction that shaped her Women and Painting seminar decades ago at Concordia, now folded back into how she talks about her own hand.

And on technique, what she looks for in "good art", she resisted the word itself: "I don't want skill — but I want it to be skilful." A distinction worth sitting with. Skill as a performance, a flex, is not the goal. Skilfulness — precision in service of something true — is. Her closing advice to the room was almost bracingly simple: honesty, hard work, and then — go for it.

The Room Itself

Photo from Artist talk with Anaïs Castro (left) and Marion Wagschal (right)

Walking the gallery after the talk, that balance she'd described was everywhere — canvases that pull you in with color and intimacy before the second look reveals what's actually happening in them. Five decades is a long time to keep finding new ways to paint the same unresolved feeling, and the exhibition doesn't try to smooth that into a clean arc. It lets the dread and the beauty sit next to each other, unreconciled, the way she clearly intends them to.

Knowing where she started — a displaced family, a late start in painting, decades spent teaching other women before turning fully back to her own canvas — makes the current show feel less like a debut and more like an accounting. Fifty-some years of looking, some of it with one eye on the world, and one, on everything the world left her carrying.

Marion Wagschal: Cyclops and Other Tales runs at the National Gallery of Canada through January 17, 2027.