Vistamare is pleased to present Ours to Keep, Maria Loboda’s inaugural exhibition at the gallery in Pescara.
The show touches upon a number of intriguing concepts, including possession, longing and the pursuit of elusive desires. Language and communication play an important role in Loboda’s work. The titles of works and exhibitions are carefully chosen to help the viewer navigate the complexity of the narrative that she builds.
“I always try to build the show around a small story – a haiku, as it were – so that all the works ‘belong to each other’ and interact”.
Loboda’s practice could be likened to the writing and rewriting of extraordinary stories, which she then manipulates, distorts or renders dysfunctional in order to make them come to life. In her artistic statements, she employs a distinctive vocabulary that draws upon a rich tapestry of cultural influences, spanning from antiquity to the present day.
The exhibition includes site-specific installations and new works created especially for the space, as well as photographic works previously presented at the Ujazdowski Castle Centre for Contemporary Art in Warsaw on the occasion of her first solo exhibition in Poland in 2019.
These photographs are depicting a person underneath a bed sheet looking at a catalogue with the aid of a flashlight. This clandestine pleasure almost becomes an erotic act, except in this scenario the object of desire is not an indecent magazine but a museum catalogue of royal Korean celadon ceramics. The unique shade of pale green of these celadon ceramics was considered a colour of transcendence and almost impossible to describe or to recreate. The title Sleeping with Gods makes reference to the sublime characteristics of celadon ceramics, which were held in high regard by the imperial courts as they were set to have mythical qualities, such as the ability to protect the beholders: their glaze would darken or shatter by any contact with poisoned food.
Bruce Chatwin, whose work Loboda admires, began his career as a catalogue writer for an auction house. His writings have started the artist’s interest in the language of cataloguing, which is both descriptive and seductive. This specific language is used to create a vivid image of the item in the mind of the reader who cannot see it in the flesh. The artist deals with this kind of unattainable attraction by using a traditional museological approach, that of Period Rooms / Dioramas. Designed to be viewed through protective glass, these displays often present a carefully crafted representation of a bygone domestic era. Loboda’s site-specific version for this exhibition offers a minimalised take on the elaborate interiors seen in museums, by focusing on only one enigmatic object to draw our attention, yet we are respectfully asked to observe it from a distance.
Upon learning that the gallery space had previously been an antique shop, the artist adapted vintage furniture as a part of the installation by paring them with new serpentine glass sculptures, titled “The Fanciers”. These enigmatic figures act as guardians of small mundane elements, transforming them into unreachable precious artefacts (Objets de Vertu). The serpents embody a dual role as both Keepers and Creators of our fascinations.
Maria Loboda (1979, Krakow, Poland) composes installations and sculptures to investigate cultural codes, pictorial signs and the grammar of different materials and objects. Her works include references to endless cultural deposits: history, poetry, art, philosophy, literature, anthropology, linguistics, science, folklore and alchemy, as well as various aspects of spirituality and transcendence in the wider sense. Her research stems from these fields and results in a formal equation of language and materiality. Through the deconstruction and reorganization of found objects and symbols, Loboda has become a unique voice in what might best be described as contemporary archaeology which creates completely new interpretations and associations by rearranging signs and restaging old symbols. Her wide-ranging exhibition activities encompass the 58th Venice Biennale (2019), Taipei Biennial (2014), and documenta 13 (2012). Important solo exhibitions include Senckenberg Museum for Natural History, Frankfurt (2023), Schirn Kunsthalle, Frankfurt a.M. (2018/19), Ujazdowski Castle Centre for Contemporary Art, Warsaw (2019), Kunsthalle Basel (2017), Institut d’art contemporain, Villeurbanne (2017), The Power Plant, Toronto (2016), and Reina Sofia, Madrid (2013). She is the first recipient of the Otilie Röderstein grant from the Hessian Ministry of Education in 2022. Loboda lives and works in Krakow and Berlin.