Maria Nepomuceno
Always in a Spiral
January 23 – June 6
Curator: Elisabeth Millqvist
Magasin 3 Stockholm Konsthall
Frihamnen, SE -115 56 Stockholm
Phone: +46 8 545 680 40
art@magasin3.com
Maria Nepomuceno lets four of her sculptural hammocks suspend in the exhibition space at Magasin 3. The artist allows her sculptures to spread across the exhibition like vegetation in a mysterious garden. She uses rope and necklaces as raw material for her work, letting them take on their natural spiral form. For Nepomuceno the metaphor for the body and nature is central. She describes rope as a line, an umbilical cord, and every bead as a fertile point and a possible beginning that can be multiplied infinitely. The shapes are reminiscent of living organisms while at the same time oscillating between amorphous and unmistakably phallic, like Louise Bourgeois’ works in stone. In one work a giant bead rests in a hammock while another sculpture is filled with thousands of small glittering beads. Every time she exhibits a sculpture she changes it and combines a part of it with another or takes it apart completely. Nepomuceno is inspired by ancient traditions and materials giving them new form and content. In Latin America hammocks are places of sleep, birth and death but the artist is also interested in the movement, the rocking motion.
She says of her work, “I want to create a situation that feels like transiting from the beginning of our culture to the present.”
Maria Nepomuceno has re-worked existing sculptures and created new ones for the space. The exhibition at Magasin 3 is her first Scandinavian solo show. Born in 1976 in Rio de Janeiro, Maria Nepomuceno studied painting and drawing at Parque Lage`s visual arts school with among others Beatriz Milhazes before studying industrial design at the University of Rio de Janeiro and art and philosophy at the School of Visual Arts in Rio de Janeiro. Her work has been featured in solo exhibitions at Galerie Karsten Greve, Cologne & Paris, Steve Turner Contemporary, Los Angeles and at A Gentil Carioca Gallery, Rio de Janeiro to mention a few. In 2009 she was a part of the group exhibition “Age of Anxiety”, Volta New York and the previous year she exhibited at Toyota Museum of Contemporary Art, Nagoya.
