Friday 15 May 2026
3:30 pm - 4:30 pm
Friends of the Glynn Vivian talk with artist, Mark Stewart-Deane
Friday, 15 May
3:30pm – 4:30pm
Join us for this free talk with Mark Stewart-Deane, fine artist and practice-based PhD candidate at Swansea College of Art.
19th March 2026
This talk will introduce the life and work of Marie-Louise von Motesiczky (1906–1996), an Austrian-born Jewish painter shaped profoundly by exile.
Trained by Max Beckmann and connected to Vienna’s rich cultural world, she developed a distinctive, intimate form of psychological portraiture that continued after she fled to Britain in 1939. Her mother-series, self-portraits, and domestic interiors reveal themes of identity, belonging, and resilience.
The talk situates her among key influences and émigré peers while reflecting on the speaker’s own experience of living abroad and on museum-copying practice, offering a contemporary lens through which to understand her work.
A portrait of Marie Louise von Motesiczky is currently on display in room 3, part of the National Portrait Gallery touring exhibition, Lives in Motion: Stories of Migration from the 11th Century to the Present Day.
Free. Booking Essential.
Call 01792 516900 or book online
Mark Stewart-Deane
Mark Stewart-Deane is a fine artist and practice-based PhD candidate at Swansea College of Art. His research explores painting as a relational practice of attention. By making careful copies of works from the canonical archive, he uses repetition as a method to question authorship, presence and how meaning is carried across time.
Trained in painting, drawing and printmaking, Mark holds a First Class BA (Hons) and an MA with Distinction from University of Wales Trinity Saint David, and also teaches fine art to adult learners in Pembrokeshire. His practice moves between studio, archive and pedagogy, treating painting not as reproduction, but as an embodied act of encounter.
Before returning to academia, he spent nearly two decades working internationally in film, specialising in underwater cinematography—an experience that continues to shape his sensitivity to framing, duration and attention.
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