MARGARET MUNZ-LOSCH’s body of work reflects a deep fascination with mystery and adventure. Her vivid compositions observe complex-and sometimes uneasy-relationships between the natural world, art, and identity. Playfully, these works entice viewers into surrealist dreamscapes that marry the mundane with the fantastic, the contemporary with the historical. Strange and evocative, Munz-Losch’s inharmoniously layered elements deliver equal parts social critique and visual delight.

Throughout her career, Munz-Losch has resisted convention. Foregoing a traditional fine art education, she independently refined her meticulous style, which often combines diverse media (such as colored pencil and acrylic paint on panel). As an emerging artist, she exhibited her work in Los Angeles, California. Munz-Losch also became the director of a mural company during her time in LA. This post would later prompt her move to Tennessee, where she currently resides.

The southern state has significantly impacted her creative process. In her series Damnatio Memoriae, for example, Munz-Losch reanimated the ‘road-kill’ that she encountered around her town. Determined to memorialize these creatures after their unceremonious demise, the artist gave the animals new life by rendering them in imaginary worlds with narratives that deny resolution.

Munz-Losch’s concern for the abject and overlooked in society continued in her exhibition Beauty and the Beast (2012). Her painting of a young girl and her cat, Black Cat (2009), for example, avoids the sentimental associations that typically attend such a subject in favor of a more menacing tension between humans and nature. Viewers soon experience the indelible revelation that this pre-pubescent girl’s flesh is actually composed of a mass of writhing maggots.