Opening: Thursday, April 10, 6 PM
Exhibition: April 11 — May 31, 2025
Mai 36 Galerie is delighted to announce its first solo exhibition of the work of London-based, Dutch artist Magali Reus. In “Full House” three recent bodies of sculptural and photographic work – What Grows (2022), Landings (2022) and Clementine (2022/23) – explore ecology and systems of production, teasing out the tensions between constructed nature, high technology and the impact of post-industrial human activity. These works are presented at Mai 36 Galerie alongside an intervention in the gallery space of wall paintings derived from vernacular Swiss Appenzell illustrations.
Reus’ practice often addresses existing common objects and systems, combining industrial and craft materials and processes to create a compelling open-ended symbolism and visual language that is at once oblique and effusive. In Clementine, oversized preserve jars protrude from the walls, exposing glossy, resinous contents resembling thick, artificial jams through their clear cast walls. Other examples feature more opaque, stubborn stone-like and chalky skins. The jam jar here is introduced as both a vessel of containment and a register of time. By recalling the slow process of preserving and fermentation, the Clementine works point to the tension between organic perishability and the industrial impulse to extend and manipulate natural life cycles.
These sculptural containers’ lids and sides are inscribed with a myriad of personal notations, label-like graphics and domestic graffiti, blurring the boundary between mass-produced goods and individualized rituals of preservation.
As repurposed containers, and through their inflated scale, they establish a mode of unconventional portraiture. Newly reinvented by the suggested owner, they reveal potential for an exploration of more personal re-translations and narratives.
In Reus’ work, the physical transformation and display – typically of vessels or receivers of useful action – sets the stage for objects to shed their function and enact a different image of themselves. In her photographic series titled Landings, Reus turns to the journey of fruit and the construct of the traditional still-life as a metaphor for contemporary food logistics and environmental shifts. Photographs of individual fruits in extreme close-up, are found amid container- strewn domestic construction debris, framed onto powder coated panels in muted hues of beige and cream.
These panels, which incorporate fragments of a childhood drawing by the artist, create a layered meditation on time – juxtaposing a past, idealized vision of nature with the realities of a globalized highly constructed food industry.
As Reus says, “I love the idea that we are able to mirror feeling or tone through material choices. When abstractions such as colour or form merge, they are afforded the magical capacity to communicate content.” Reus’ deft ability to tweak and manipulate frameworks gives her a palette of different resonances of meaning that can surface or be deliberately pushed to the side. Through her meticulous sculptural interventions and photographic juxtapositions, Reus reveals produce as a site of contradiction: nourishing yet industrialized, organic yet sculpted by capital and science, intimate yet globally displaced.
Each frame in the Landings series bears on its side a number indicating the distance the fruit has traveled – 9335 km for the blackberry in Landings (9335, Slopes) – highlighting the immense distances that seasonal produce now routinely traverses. As the climate shifts, the distinction between what is local and what is displaced becomes increasingly blurred, raising questions about what is lost when food is uprooted and reformulated to fit industrial demands.
In What Grows (Cut Stems) agricultural tools are transformed into sculptural hybrids for measurement and containment. Rigid sacks rendered in sand are etched with protruding graphics and commercial imagery of powdered potato, highlighting the contrast between nourishment and industrial processing and referencing a globalized food economy where organic matter is continuously reduced, substituted, and reformulated, evermore synthetic and alienated from its origin. The tape measure – a symbol of standardization – is rendered in warped, reclining form, stripped of its intended purpose. It no longer serves as an instrument of control and measure but instead takes on a more animated, organic pose, suggesting an alternative, unquantifiable relationship between food, consumption, and the human body.