Space Breathing
The work of visual artist Marena Seeling (Weurt, 1953) is in an exciting transition. Since 2022, her working method and use of materials have changed drastically and there is no way back.
Visible origin
Making origin and history visible has been an essential part of her artistry so far. For over 40 years, she reported on her observations of light and space in her native region near Weurt, located on the Waal near Nijmegen. The photos she took of this changing landscape, places that are dear to her such as the power station or the bridges over the Waal, can be found abstracted in her paintings. A number of works shown, such as the wall shapes sawn from MDF and painted with oil paint, and the Pools of Light, manually sanded aluminium panels, have their origins in these earlier works. We see striking shapes that still relate to that landscape space.
Foldable space
Since 2022, she has literally liberated herself by ‘cutting out’ the shapes from the canvas and transferring them to white cardboard. The changing light that gives colour to the white is fascinating. The notches she makes to give the cardboard its spatial shape have become graphic lines. Split pins and book screws that provide further support may also be visible.
By switching from canvas via sheet material to spatial objects in cardboard, it is as if you step into the previously suggested spaces with her and thus come closer to the essence of shape and light. In this way, she creates new space, as the title of her exhibition Space Breathing illustrates.
New idiom
In contrast to Seeling’s earlier work, her new formal language from 2022 onwards is hardly traceable. References to her history and birthplace have made way for shape and material studies that show the transition from drawing to pattern and construction sheet and then spatial object. In this way, she develops an independent idiom and distances herself by choosing a sober material that has no history. And that works very liberating. The material, which is usually used to package content, is used by her to create content.
During Voids and Volumes in 2022, a duo exhibition with Franck Gribling in Locus Solus, Amsterdam, she will present her Cardboard Constructions for the first time. This will be followed by several exhibitions at home and abroad.
The spaces in the basement of the EICAS museum have a character of their own and are very suitable for showing experiments or for being used as a total work of art. This fits in well with the work of Marena Seeling. We see her latest explorations, including the use of colour pigment on a number of works. She also investigates how a number of earlier wall panels resonate in her new work. Seeling’s work invites you to wander around the basement and experience the effect of space and light.
Zero
Individually, Marena Seeling is going through the transition that ZERO artists also initiated in the sixties: reducing, concentrating and renewing artistic forms and freeing yourself from prevailing views. Her work transforms into the essence of material, form and space and as she herself says: “it means something because it is there.”
Seeling feels strongly present in her work: “I am the filter of all the impressions and experiences that have led to the work I am making now.” In that respect, she has not so much detached herself from her history with Weurt as transformed it and reduced it to its essence, ‘purified’ in the Cardboard Constructions. [Xandra Manuputty, curator museum EICAS]