Magali Reus | Off Script

On 10 April 2024 at the Museo del Novecento in Milan, Fondazione Arnaldo Pomodoro presents Off Script, a solo exhibition by the Dutch artist Magali Reus (The Hague, 1981), winner of the 7th edition of the Arnaldo Pomodoro Sculpture Prize.

This exhibition, in collaboration with the Museo del Novecento and curated by Federico Giani, includes a selection of the artist's most recent sculptures, the Clementine series which take their visual cue from familiar jam and preserves jars. In these works the nostalgia of domestic food production is intertwined with the reality of mass production and distribution by multinational corporations; the re-appropriation and reuse of these objects within the domestic context transforms these jars into contradictory objects, containers of intimate and personal memories. The Clementine series, in their newly oversized guise, constructed in synthetic resins and metals, are intentionally artificial and destabalizing sculptural objects. They play out, according to Reus' poetics, a reconfiguration of the familiar and habitualised objects that constitute our world.
 
During the period of the exhibition, Fondazione Arnaldo Pomodoro will present a new artist's book by Magali Reus, published in collaboration with Lenz Press, at the Museo del Novecento: an original type specimen book built around the KOOL font ("cabbage" in Dutch). This font, halfway between vegetal alphabet and concrete poetry, is the result of research Reus has carried out for the past three years following the visual and calligraphic relationship between slivers of shredded red cabbage and the letters of the Latin alphabet.
 
Magali Reus won the Prix de Rome (2015) and was shortlisted for Hepworth Prize for Sculpture (2018). The Arnaldo Pomodoro Sculpture Prize Selection Committee – composed of Julia Draganović, Bassam El Baroni, Krist Gruijthuijsen, Gianfranco Maraniello, Lorenzo Respi, Andrea Viliani and chaired by Arnaldo Pomodoro – awarded her in recognition and support of her practice which, as they declared, “deals with the accumulation of images and things she finds, either through found constellations of streets, of indoors or via the digital world, often playing with the scale, blows things up or shrinks them down. By embracing – in a sense – Pop Art's gaze on banal day-to-day objects and products, she opens up new perspectives of approach to the world around us, unfamiliarizing us from the reality we seem to recognize at first. Although a keen observer of the physical world, Reus avoids using readymade objects, instead each element of her sculptural jigsaws has been meticulously fabricated using a mixture of technological and traditionally craft-based techniques, further demonstrating a refined sensibility for the materiality, composition and colour of sculpture. Magali Reus is a sculptor in the truest sense, with an original approach to form and space, and to the notion and practice of sculpture, that pushes the potential of the sculptural object in new directions”.
 
For the third consecutive edition, the Prize exhibition is organized with the collaboration of the Area Musei d’Arte Moderna e Contemporanea of the Municipality of Milan, and enjoys the Media Partnership of IGP Decaux.
 
The exhibition is among the events of Milano Art Week (8-14 April 2024), the widespread event coordinated by the Municipality of Milan in collaboration with miart, the modern and contemporary art fair of Milan, which brings together the main institutions public and private, with a program full of activities and projects, enriching the cultural panorama of the city with collateral events that reconfirm Milan as a privileged place for the exploration and investigation of contemporary languages.
 

Vai alla guida d'arte di Milan