MARIA ZAHLE
TURN, TURN, TURN
08.09-08.10.22
ARCADE | BRUSSELS
Extended hours during Brussels Gallery Weekend
08/09/10, 11-19h / 11, 11-18h
Ocean
2018
hand coloured paper collage, archival tape (framed)
59.5 x 79 cm
On the occasion of Brussels Gallery Weekend, Arcade is pleased to present a solo exhibition with Danish artist Maria Zahle. Our programme for the gallery weekender also includes an evening of poetry and publishing on Sept 8 and an offsite project @L’imprimerie for the Sculpture Factory.
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“Maria Zahle’s works are made with a small range of materials: woven linen, wool, natural dyes, metal bars and wire, stones, crayon, hand-coloured paper, and archival tape. Many of the materials, importantly, have been sourced or created by the artist before she puts them to use in one of her objects. Zahle taught herself how to weave, learning a few patterns and traditional techniques, and produces her own fabrics. Perhaps more unusually, she also learned how to make dyes, sometimes growing the plants whose roots or leaves she boils and ferments. Colour, which we usually appreciate as a visual component of an art work, has always been seen by Zahle as a material. One could even say that the sculptural process begins, for her, in planting and picking, cooking and cooling of dyes.”
“While Zahle never quotes or appropriates the work of other artists, there are clear connections between her work and that of her predecessors. The paper works recall many works of Ellsworth Kelly’s. She has long been drawn to the finely tuned humility of Richard Tuttle’s sculptures, from the Wire Pieces of the early 1970s to the more colourful wall assemblages of the early 1980s made with card, twigs, plywood, felt, and paint.”
“Zahle’s interest in the culture of the 1970s signals a deeply felt scepticism about contemporary obsessions with technology and social media, but there is nothing nostalgic or puritanical about her art. She is no Luddite. As soon as we look at her work, it’s clear that when she needs to, she will use mass-produced metal rods ordered to her studio from the internet, or ripstop nylon, or indeed archival tape, alongside all the home-dyed, hand-woven cloths.“
Excerpts from Mark Godfrey’s text Cast of Characters published in the catalogue for Maria Zahle: No Stranger or Lover to Me at Rønnebæksholm, Denmark (2022)
MARIA ZAHLE
THE TOE
THE HORSE
THE SISTER
Thursday Sept 8, 19-21h
An evening of poetry and publishing with Maria Zahle and Melissa Gordon
The evening will also launch the book The Toe The Horse The Sister, a new book of visual poetry by artist Maria Zahle. This collection of 25 poems reflects on her life as an artist, mother, sister, daughter and lover. During the evening Zahle and Gordon will read aloud from the new publication.
The poems oscillate between lived experience and formal experimentation, described through memories and intimate speculations. The poetry shape-shifts between words and visual marks: insistent groupings of punctuation, drawn shapes and repeating patterns. Each page is a tactile space, with language and image vibrating in tension with each other. This sculptural poetry encourages an active reader.
Many of the poems reflect on small but vivid events retold and refracted through language. The book is not a linear narrative, but rather an exploration of the ways in which experience and memory collide, fragment and overlap within our consciousness. Throughout our lives, we all exist as a range of selves, taking on various roles – child, adult, artist, friend, stranger. In Zahle’s poems, these selves are present all at once. There is no boundary between a memory, a touch, a word, a thought.
Our project room Pete and Repeat will present published material from local artist and editor Melissa Gordon, whose collected publishing and writings will be available throughout the exhibition.
The Toe, The Horse, The Sister
Publisher: Akerman Daly
Pages: 28
Dimensions: 165 x 298 mm
Format: Softcover, Singer sewn, edition of 250, signed by the artist
2021
SCULPTURE FACTORY
with the support of Art Brussels @L’imprimerie
For its 15th anniversary, Brussels Gallery Weekend gives a carte blanche to a selection of galleries who bring large format works.
Me As Paper (Madder) is a roll and a surface, hovering between image and object, sculpture and painting. As the title suggests the work is not merely a prepped material, a roughly dyed expanse of paper, but rather a type of self-portrait.
Me As Paper (Madder), 2021
Cotton paper, alum treated and dipped in madder plant dye, adhesive
Dimensions variable, size of paper approx:
H161 x L500cm
Maria Zahle (1979, Copenhagen, DK) received a BA(Hons) in Fine Art at the Slade School of Fine Art, London, UK (2008) and received her Postgraduate Diploma from the Royal Academy Schools, London, UK (2009).
Recent solo exhibitions include No Stranger or Lover to Me, Rønnebæksholm, Næstved, DK, (2022); Nat Skærer Blå (with Christine Clemmesen), Hillerød Bibliotek, DK (2021); Sunny Legs (with Tillmann Terbuyken), Friese Künstlerhaus, Hamburg, DE (2021), HHH HHV HHH (feat. DEAP), Aga Works, Copenhagen, DK (2020). She is a founding member of the music group Squares & Triangles and co-director (with Jason Dungan) of Polychrome, a space for art, music and poetry in Copenhagen, DK. Her second book of poetry The Toe The Horse The Sister was published by AkermanDaly with a performance and launch at Kunsthal Charlottenborg, DK (both 2021).