A retrospective of the London-based Dutch artist's work over two decades.
Our Volumes is a comprehensive catalogue based on a recent mid-career retrospective of Magali Reus at the Museum Kurhaus Kleve, Germany (2024).
Structured around seven chapters, the book chronicles or "volumes" by employing an archival aesthetic. It features a highly insightful and elaborate newly commissioned essay by Evan Moffitt on Reus' work at Museum Kurhaus Kleve.
In addition to expansive exhibition views, the book engages in dialogue with photographic imagery drawn from the Museum Kurhaus Kleve's noted historical collection. This includes items such as ancient religious woodcarvings, ornate silverware and artist Ewald Mataré's (1887-1965, GER) sculpture, which can be found contrastingly paired alongside the artist's careful selection of over a hundred works spanning a period of two decades.
Born in 1981 in The Hague, London-based artist Magali Reus is one of the most acclaimed new voices in contemporary sculpture. Renowned for her interest in the relationship between mass-produced articles and the human body in the context of today's digital society, Magali Reus draws on a vast range of formal influences and references, from the domestic to the industrial, the functional to decorative, creating pieces that evolve as an accumulation and layering of sculptural details. Taking everyday objects as starting points, her work operates on a visual register as a formal configuration, but also as a choreography of emotional and physical experience. For her, objects like fridges, padlocks, seating, and street curbs are not seen only as facilitators of our everyday actions, but also as physical receptacles for our bodies. She is thus interested in positioning them not only as shells or providers, but as objects imbued with their own sense of personality. Detached from their surroundings and translated into immaculate, abstract forms they become uncanny and perplexing, acquiring a very different life, which is almost theatrical. Colliding the macro logic of daily architecture with the more metaphorical projections of a body inhabiting space, Magali Reus' practice focuses on the physical and psychic space of objecthood.
