Marguerite Anielle-Palen was born into an Italian family in Switzerland. Most of her time she lives in Switzerland, sometimes staying in Paris and Italy. She took up painting in 1980 after finishing the Paris studio of Georges Drobot, a priest and icon-painter. In the early 1990s, along with the artist Stomatis Skliris, Anielle-Palen worked on church murals in Italy. Although the artist had contributed to exhibitions in Turin, Venice and Paris, this was her first ever show in St Petersburg. The display comprised over sixty paintings made between 1994 and 2000. The inner light of man is the reflection of the divine light, which dissipates the gloom of life. This idea is very close to the heart of the artist, who tries to express the poetry of the light that transforms our lives and accentuates their real values. The artist finds the poetry of light in mythology, legends, fairytales, icon-painting, folk decorative art and the works of the naive or primitive artists. Marguerite Anielle-Palen's artistic consciousness and painting technique are very similar to those of the aforementioned categories of artists. Marguerite Anielle-Palen's art appeals to viewer's childhood memories, making us sense the world as something filled with bright and gleaming colours, where the objects are seen as if for the first time, from their attractive side, not completely cognized and wonderfully enigmatic. The artist's canvases evoke the desire to return to the sources of naive optimism.