A SENTENCE IN SOIL by Magali Reus
with recent works on display
Friday February 3, 8pm
installation view, A Sentence in Soil, Nasher Sculpture Centre 2022
‘A Sentence in Soil’ celebrates and documents the eponymous exhibition by artist Magali Reus, held at the Nasher Sculpture Center in Dallas, Texas, in 2022.
In her second major US show, Magali Reus presents an installation of new work that examines how the forms of simple, recognisable objects can generate an immediate chain of associations when dislocated from their original functions.
Reus’s sculptures often spring from a common object removed from its ordinary use to become a point of departure for the creation of sculptures that explore, expand upon, and contradict the physical properties and cultural baggage of its source objects. For nearly a decade, she has achieved this proliferation of associations by working in series, developing groups of sculptures out of her initial engagement with a given type of object: “The idea of multiplication or seriality can also be used as a rhythmic device for enforcing relationships to physicality.” These relationships are formed in the crux of Reus’s practice, which encompasses digitally designed forms, complex procedures of molding, casting, and 3D printing, and prolonged periods of finishing and adjustment by hand—all carried out using a dizzying array of materials, from aluminum, steel, and wood to resin, nylon, and fabric. The initial abstraction that distances objects from their usual role in the world denatures them, allowing other associations to seep in and lending her sculptures their otherworldly affect.
The result is an exhibition of complexity unprecedented in her work. The world’s pandemic isolation has prompted renewed consideration of the objects that surround us and of issues that are crucial to the themes coursing through A Sentence in Soil: the tensions between openness and confinement, our connections to the natural world as a source of both respite and anxiety, and how we have constructed the very idea of “nature” as well as the means we have created to engineer, experience, and understand it.
The publication, published by The Nasher Sculpture Center, Dallas, USA, and designed by studio Wolfe Hall, explores the exhibition through installation photography, alongside more in-detail documentation of the works. The publication also features a small selection of in-progress documentation and preparatory source material. It includes an essay by Nasher curator Catherine Craft.
Magali Reus (1981, The Hague) lives and works in London. Recent and upcoming solo exhibitions include Museum Kurhaus Kleve, DE; Galerie Greta Meert, Brussels (both 2024); Kunsthalle Bratislava, SK; On Like Scenery, Museum Dhondt-Dhaenens, Deurle, BE (both 2023); XII, The Approach, London; And Orchard, François Ghebaly, Los Angeles; A sentence in soil, Nasher Sculpture Center, Dallas; Shadow Tonics, Galerie Fons Welters, Amsterdam (all 2022); Pale Planets, Nuno Centeno, Porto (2021); As mist, description, South London Gallery, London (2018) and many others. Reus was shortlisted for the Hepworth Prize for Sculpture 2018, and in 2015 was awarded The Prix de Rome.