Margaret von Kaenel’s work titled Loki’s Hel, Pushing Up Daisies has been accepted into the St Louis Artist’s Guild’s Clearly Human VI Exhibition, opening April 17 through May 23, 2026.
Margaret’s piece is a decorative art painting that she demonstrated at Salon Horsens, in Horsens, Denmark, 2025. This piece has a metallic blue background upon which she applied copper leaf. The center copper leaf was distressed with vinegar, sealed and then painted with both acrylic and oil paints. The border was created with a hand cut stencil, through which she applied leaf sizing and tamise flakes. The theme for Salon was The Age of Vikings. This piece reflects Hel, Loki’s daughter who rules the Underworld pushing through a field of daisies coming to the real world. The daisies represent the favorite flower of the Queen of Denmark. Margaret likes to use humor with trompe l’oeil in many of her paintings, and this is a self portrait of her aging.
Clearly Human VI is an all-media group exhibition of artwork focused on the human figure. The Exhibit gives a comprehensive look at the many ways of representing the human figure, from traditional to contemporary, realistic to fanciful, beautiful to unsettling. It seeks a diverse view of humanity representing subjects varying greatly in gender, age, ethnicity and nationality. The selected artists used the figure to explore a wide variety of themes, including definitions of beauty, perceptions of history, relationship with nature and moments of everyday life.
The juror for this exhibition was Livia Xandersmith. Ms. Xandersmith is a surrealist figurative painter living and working in Saint Louis, Missouri. She creates oil paintings and painted installations that complicate space and obscure the line between the real and the imagined, the past and the present, and seeks to explore the power of images and memory within our contemporary and digital age.
The St Louis Artist’s Guild is located at 12 North Jackson Ave, Clayton, MO 63105. Hours are Tuesday – Friday 10am-6pm and Saturday 10am-4pm.