Marilyn Borglum was almost born with a pencil or paintbrush in her hand. Her family endorsed her interest in drawing at a very young age. Her grandmother Marion Ewald and her grandmother’s uncles Gutzon and Solon Borglum were all professional artists. At the age of just four years old, she was emulating Leonardo Da Vinci’s drawings of horses.

These equine works play an important role throughout her career. Her explicit imagery, which can often be moody or disturbing, uses figuration and forms as metaphors—or rather symbolic constructions—to unravel, disentangle and examine life, our vulnerability, and more. Marilyn Borglum often selects identifiable subjects through intriguing parallels and various analogies for meaning within her paintings. In a way, she confronts the viewer with our behavioral patterns or parallels of our own lives before tempering the weight of the image and the confrontation for the viewer with both sarcasm and beauty.

From a visual perspective, her painterly practice is strongly inspired and influenced by masters such as Willem de Kooning, Francis Bacon and Ben Shahn. With every work, the American artist is searching for the ideal degree of execution, in which the form expresses the emotion from within by bold and unique painterly interventions. Think of her mark-making within the pictures. The organic lines have traces within her childhood drawings, resulting in an almost lyrical dance of different realities.

Marilyn has worked professionally for three decades, exhibiting at several national and international art galleries. She holds a BFA and MFA in painting from Colorado State University (1984, 1993).