Background
Gartner was born in Winnipeg but moved to Calgary during her early childhood.
Gartner was born in Winnipeg but moved to Calgary during her early childhood.
Deirdre Hanna wrote the following about Gartner: "Award-winning essayist, Alberto Manguel, put Calgary-based Winnipeg native Marianna Gartner in the international limelight when he chose her as the only Canadian artist to profile in Reading Pictures, a book that also looks at paintings by historical giants including Pablo Picasso and Caravaggio.
She currently lives and works in Vancouver and Europe. Foreign her first solo show since that book"s publication, Sable-Castelli"s Stepping Out, Gartner pulls back from the tattooed babies and circus freaks that first caught Manguel"s attention." "Instead, she focuses on what is both disturbed and disturbing in more banal (at first glance, anyway) imagery -- like the 19th-century, tweed-and-mutton-chop-whisker-sporting gunman in I"d Rather Be Hunting, or the surreal little girl in a lacy pinafore of Saint Margaret And The Dragon." "Gartner"s fascination with Victorian curios is very much in evidence in these near-monochromatic canvases, and as her references get more subtle, the parallels with John Tenniel"s illustrations for Alice In Wonderland become more apparent.".