Marion Verboom

Mitage

26 January until 5 March 2011

Press Release

Jeanine Hofland Contemporary Art proudly presents Mitage, the first solo exhibition of French artist Marion Verboom (1983, FR) at the gallery.

'Mitage' is the French word for urban or suburban sprawl, a word that defines the spreading outwards of a city and its suburbs to its outskirts. The architecture of the suburban outskirts is often characterized by an eclectic and hybrid assemblage of styles, an intricate wilds of constructions, which serve as a framework for Marion Verboom's art practice.

The two photographs in the exhibition entitled Krasnoyarsk#1 (2010) and Krasnoyarsk#2 (2010) portray architectural remains found in the suburban area of Krasnoyarsk in Siberia and exemplify the fragmented construction that has been isolated from its original function that Marion Verboom explores in her work. The photographic perspective allows the artist to construe a building or object into individual fragments, reducing its status to the contructivist idea of the pure geometrical form.

The constructivist approach of the geometrical form is clearly emphasized in the wooden and plaster sculpture entitled Étude autour du Socle (Study around a socle, 2009), based on Kazimir Malevich Architectones. The sculpture is composed out of volumes that resemble the surface, angles, negative spaces and interstices of an archetypical rectangle shaped socle, and balances between a modernist sculpture and an utopian architectural folly.

This tension between sculptural and architectural references is also emphasized in the Kenning (2010) series, of which Kenning#3 will be on view in the exhibition. The Kenning series revolve around a fragment of a jaguar statue that was placed next to the entrance of a pre-Columbian city to protect it from strangers. Verboom has isolated the paw of the jaguar and mutated the detail into various compositions.

Kenning#3 consists out of a triple repetition of the fragment, adjusted to a wooden hinge on the walls of the gallery. The location and composition transform the paw into an architectural ornament, that simultaneously reminds of the socialist raised fist symbol. An associative appropriation of the object, which is also emphasized in the title of the work, as Kenning means a two-word phrase metaphor.

Most of Verboom's works request such a renewed appropriation of the object. A renewed meaning that often balances between pure geometrical form, art historical resemblance and utopian architecture.

Marion Verboom received a DNSEP at the École Nationale Supérieure des Beaux Arts de Paris and is currently an artist in residence at the Ateliers in Amsterdam. Her work has been included in several group exhibitions in Europe and is currently on view at Aponia Centre D'art Contemporain in Villiers Sur Marne (FR). The upcoming year Marion Verboom will have a duo exhibition together with painter Eva Nielsen at Maison des Arts in Grand Quevilly (FR) and her work will be shown during the Offspring exhibition at the Ateliers. In 2010 the artist has been awarded the Prix Félix Fénéon by the University of Paris.

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