Publication documenting a series of sculptural works focusing on everyday items.
In the spring of 2015, Magali Reus opened the first in a series of four exhibitions of new work co-commissioned and presented by SculptureCenter, New York; Hepworth Wakefield, England; Westfälischer Kunstverein, Münster, Germany; and Fondazione Sandretto Re Rebaudengo, Turin, Italy. The culmination of these collaborative projects is documented in this publication, marking an important chapter in the evolution of Reus's work. As Andrew Bonacina writes in his essay, “Magali Reus has evolved a practice that requires a constant examination of how we engage with, and understand, the everyday items that accompany us in the world—the ‘supporting-cast' objects that we rely on but rarely acknowledge. Relieved of their functionality through Reus's re-transcriptions—rendered as useless as a mug without a bottom or a book sealed in plastic—their newfound role as sculpture forces them to articulate their objecthood in alternative ways, through attitude or gesture. They become vessels waiting to be filled by the viewer's own physical and emotional relationship to them. Operating somewhere between uniformity and personalization, Reus's sculptures become spaces in which objects are finding their place, where things are working themselves out.”
Published following the series of exhibition “Spring for a Ground”, SculptureCenter, New York, from May 3 to July 5, 2015, “Particle of Inch”, Hepworth Wakefield, from July 18 to Octobrer 11, 2015, “Halted Paves”, Westfälischer Kunstverein, Münster, from October 31, 2015, to January, 17, 2016, “Quarters”, Fondazione Sandretto Re Rebaudengo, Turin, from March 30 to June 12, 2016.
Born in 1981 in The Hague, London-based artist Magali Reus is one of the most acclaimed new voices in contemporary sculpture. Renowned for her interest in the relationship between mass-produced articles and the human body in the context of today's digital society, Magali Reus draws on a vast range of formal influences and references, from the domestic to the industrial, the functional to decorative, creating pieces that evolve as an accumulation and layering of sculptural details. Taking everyday objects as starting points, her work operates on a visual register as a formal configuration, but also as a choreography of emotional and physical experience. For her, objects like fridges, padlocks, seating, and street curbs are not seen only as facilitators of our everyday actions, but also as physical receptacles for our bodies. She is thus interested in positioning them not only as shells or providers, but as objects imbued with their own sense of personality. Detached from their surroundings and translated into immaculate, abstract forms they become uncanny and perplexing, acquiring a very different life, which is almost theatrical. Colliding the macro logic of daily architecture with the more metaphorical projections of a body inhabiting space, Magali Reus' practice focuses on the physical and psychic space of objecthood.
