First monograph (work from 2009 to 2012), with three essays and an interview.
“Verbal sculptures” and “strange archaeologies”—Maria Loboda's recent works expose prior events through sparse details of entangled secrets, material contradictions, and masked collusions. Her sculpture is both indulgently verbal and obstinately reserved. Oh, Wilderness also demonstrates the artist's aesthetic equation between language and materiality as it works the other way around, translating materials expressive of a certain weak semiotics to language. Through these materials, nature is observed and read—now constituting a grammar, rigorously arbitrary, formal, and conventional.
The book contains a Q&A between Loboda, Caterina Riva, and Isobel Harbison, which traces the artist's work and context. An essay by Riva highlights Loboda's use of antagonisms, duality, and enigmas in her practice; Lars Bang Larsen points to a state of echoing and spiritualization in Loboda's works; and Harbison analyzes the engagement with history and artifact in Loboda's new approach to sculpture.
Born 1979 in Krakow (Poland), Maria Loboda lives and works in New York.
Her work brings into play several elements that conjure up and oppose rarely associated fields, such as art and Occult sciences. The artist is renowned for the practice of setting up knowledge systems and their formalisation, assigning them magic incantations or spiritual forces. The intangibility of the meaning behind Maria Loboda's works contrasts with the strong presence of shapes and materials echoing the complexity of an ambivalent world, where forces can be continually overturned, revived or simply ignored, through code systems and their aesthetic materialisation.
