Marion Borgelt was born in Moree, New South Wales in 1956. One of Australia’s most thoughtful and consistently original abstract artists, she has built a practice over four decades that moves between painting, works on paper, and installation — always in pursuit of the luminous, the meditative, and the relationship between the mark, the void, and the light that exists between them. Her work is quiet but never passive, drawing the viewer into a sustained and rewarding contemplation.
Borgelt studied at the City Art Institute in Sydney and later in New York, where exposure to American abstraction deepened her understanding of scale, space, and the expressive possibilities of pure form. Her paintings typically employ circles, spheres, and organic forms rendered in rich, layered surfaces that build slowly toward a quality of inner light — works that feel simultaneously ancient and entirely contemporary, rooted in both Western abstraction and Eastern meditative traditions.
Her prints Magical Decay No. 1 and Magical Decay No. 2 (1995), produced in collaboration with Fred Genis at the Byron Bay studio, are characteristic of her mature practice. The title itself is quietly paradoxical — decay as a magical rather than a mournful process, transformation rather than loss. The works reflect her sustained interest in natural processes, organic form, and the beauty that emerges from impermanence and change.
Borgelt has exhibited widely in Australia and internationally, and her work is held in major collections including the National Gallery of Australia and the Art Gallery of New South Wales.
Marion Borgelt continues to live and work in Sydney.
