Save the date Magali Reus and Mitsuko Miwa

Vernissage on Thursday, February 29
In presence of the artists 
6 ⏤ 8pm
 

​Galerie Greta Meert is pleased to present HOTELS,  Magali Reus's first solo exhibition with the gallery.

Rooted in seemingly everyday objects and images, Reus’ work initially evokes a sense of familiarity. What begins as a recognizable reference—a chair, a street curb, a fridge, a padlock, a saddle, a fire-hose, an alarm clock, a cooking pot—is gradually transformed by cross-fertilized textures, deliberately mismatched techniques, maximized anomalies, and misapplied engineering, until it migrates away from recognition and towards [removed];Visual elements are reproduced, layered and repeated in works that are individually crafted using complex casting, moulding and CNC milling and metalwork techniques, pitting the aggressive emptiness of manufacture against the slow diligence of handiwork.

Oscillating between craft-based and technological production, Reus borrows existing objects and places them within, under, next to, and inside each other in ways that are compatible with their material demands even if they are incompatible to human ones. This process of juxtaposition unfolds the hidden complexity of her works as the familiar is made strange and the disruption of ordinary settings and associations gives way to brand new, ambiguous forms.

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Image: Clementine (Lawns), 2024 (40 x 40 x 45 cm; mixed media)

Galerie Greta Meert is pleased to present its first exhibition with Japanese artist Mitsuko Miwa. The exhibition Leap Second, spread over two floors of the gallery, offers an insight into the breadth of the output of the artist, showing works from the 1980s until the present day.

The title of this exhibition is drawn from the one-second adjustment to Coordinated Universal Time (UTC), often applied to it in order to accommodate the difference between a “precise time”, measured by atomic clocks, and the “imprecise”, observed solar time that varies due to irregularities and the long-term slowdown in the rotation of the Earth. Miwa claims the space of a “leap second” within the chronology of the multiple histories of art. She reminds us with grace, wit, lightness, and tactility of the structural irregularities and slowdowns these histories undergo.

The work of Mitsuko Miwa materialises in drawings, paintings and objects, but also anything else that comes to her mind –– an infinitely varied [removed];Wary of given categories or styles, her understanding of identity is something fluid, transient and ephemeral. Her practice can be understood as a phenomenological set-up of perception: the act of looking seems to be at the centre of the work of the artist, pointing to the tension in language between materiality and meaning and the precariousness of any form of semantic [removed];

Image: Fractal Portrait, 2022 (49 x 34,5 x 1,5 cm; mixed media)