Magali Reus
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Magali Reus
Magali Reus’ (b. 1981, Den Haag) sculptural installations derive from ideas of compartmentalised privacy often experienced in bathrooms and kitchens. Motifs of filling and emptying, stuffing and purging, Reus’ sculptures allude to fridges, toilet seats and cooking pots. She creates objects which refer to devices we might actually use but they turn out to be disconnected from their actual domestic and conventional use. Using steel, rubbers and foam, sterile surfaces reserved for functional counters are here perverted: patterned with stains, soaked with rotten puddles and comically violated by leftover objects, for example burnt pizzas, rusted cookware and plastic placemats are squashed inside and between sculptures. Fabricated from folded steel plate the formal language of her sculptures could be linked with the coldness of Brutalist architecture, but with their organically spewing interiors these works are bound up more with the excesses of consumer society and the body and its immediate extensions. Piled and open-ended her sculptures function as screens: closing off, opening up, forming translucencies, windows and backdrops for more narrative suggestions of social taboo, of sexual or economic transaction, and domestic escapade. Reus alienates the relationship between bodies and objects and creates hybrids of the lifeless and the animate, the sterile and the contaminated.
Magali Reus was born in 1981 in Den Haag, The Netherlands and lives and works in London. She studied at Rijksakademie van der Beeldende Kunsten in Amsterdam and holds an MFA in Fine Art from Goldsmiths College in London. Recent group exhibitions include Nature after Nature (Fridericianum, Kassel, Germany) or Geographies of Contamination (David Roberts Art Foundation, London, UK). She has a forthcoming solo exhibition at The Hepworth Wakefield and Fondazione Sandretto Re Rebaudengo in Turin, Italy, in 2015 and recent exhibitions include In Lukes and Dregs, The Approach, London (2014); Highly Liquid, Galerie Fons Welters, Amsterdam (2013); Out of Empty, Albert Baronian, Room, Brussels (2013); Hands Down, unosolo project room, Milan (2012); ON, The Approach, London (2011).
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