DALLAS, TX.- The Nasher Sculpture Center announces Magali Reus: A Sentence in Soil, on view May 14 - September 11, 2022. The exhibition will be the second major US show for the Netherlands-born, London-based artist.
The meticulously rendered sculptures of Magali Reus often find their inspiration in a readily overlooked everyday object—a dehumidifier, a no-parking sign, a ladder—removing it from its original, useful purpose and transmuting it into a form open to a wide-ranging accrual of new identities, meanings, and associations. Reus describes this act of an object’s physical transformation as “destabilizing and emancipatory,” one that allows it to perform a different function than the one people normally associate it with. These objects and their new functions reflect the disjointed character of contemporary life, where digital production and consumption makes our interactions with objects a more isolated and alienated process.
“We are very enthusiastic about Magali Reus’s exhibition here at the Nasher this spring. Her enigmatic sculptural objects and arrangements promise to inspire curiosity as well as a deep consideration of our complicated contemporary material and digital culture,” says Director Jeremy Strick.
Reus’s thoughtful interrogations of the metaphorical play between objects and our own bodies can generate a dreamlike logic providing insights into the often-disjointed character of contemporary life, where we may accord greater attention to the virtual realm than our actual surroundings and where the production, distribution, and consumption of objects become processes that are frequently obscured, isolated, and alienated from one another.
For her Nasher exhibition, Reus has created several series of new sculptures. One of these will unspool the distinctive typography and color of the Nasher’s specially designed green “EXIT” signs, while another will present large, wall-mounted works that bring together two transitory sites of exchange: the fruit bowl—a staple of still life painting for centuries—and the market stall where the bowl’s contents might be received, displayed and sold. The exhibition’s postponement from 2020, due to the Covid-19 pandemic, has also resulted in a new group of photographic works, called Knaves, that consider the mysterious life of mushrooms, encountered on walks in nature that Reus took during lockdown. A publication with an essay by the exhibition’s curator, Nasher Curator Catherine Craft, will be released while Magali Reus: A Sentence in Soil is on view at the Nasher.
About Magali Reus
Born in The Hague, Netherlands, in 1981, Magali Reus graduated with an MFA from Goldsmiths College in London, where she currently lives and works. Her work has been the focus of several museum exhibitions, including presentations at Hepworth Wakefield (2015 and 2018); Westfälischer Kunstverein, Münster (2015); SculptureCenter, New York (2015); Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam (2016); Kunstmuseum St. Gallen (2017); Bergen-Kunsthall (2017); and South London Gallery (2018). In 2013-2014 she held a residency at the Rijksakademie van Beeldende Kunsten, Amsterdam, and in 2015 she was awarded the Prix de Rome; she was nominated for the Hepworth Prize for Sculpture in 2018. Her works are in the collections of the Hessel Museum of Art, Bard College, Annandale-on-Hudson, New York; Rubell Family Collection, Miami; Stedelijk Museum; Tate, London; and others.
