Sarah Margnetti: Supportive Structures

For her solo show in the MCBA Project Space, Sarah Margnetti (b. 1983, lives and works in Brussels) is presenting a series of new canvases and wall paintings that revisit the major themes that have run through her work to date.

With a sure mastery of the trompe-l’oeil technique, Sarah Margnetti has developed a pictorial style that combines optical illusion and abstract forms. Deployed in monumental wall paintings or on canvas, these motifs represent body parts whose functions are often reappropriated (an ear, for instance, becomes an entire body, a body a brain, and entwined fingers a fence or grating) or worked out in multiple variations. They spring from or melt into elements of the architecture or setting drawn from the world of the theatre (curtains, balustrades, theatre seats, etc.) in a play of inside and out, dream and reality. Among the sensory organs, the ear is a recurring motif. It merges with the knots in the wood of a trompe-l’oeil setting, is transformed into an artist’s palette, or replaces the eyes in a face. The artist’s work then seems to emphasize listening over speech and vision, playing with and undermining art history’s traditional motifs, notably that of the female body.

In the MCBA Project Space, Sarah Margnetti has installed a selection of canvases along with wall paintings done on site that borrow from, extend, or revisit elements that are central to her practice. On the glass façade, the artist plays with a curtain motif. Like glass, the curtain is that element which both separates and connects inside and out. While curtains indeed obstruct our view, they also allow us to feel, hear, even touch what is found directly behind them, whereas glass makes it possible to connect visually what it physically separates. All of Sarah Margnetti’s work focuses on porosity, passage, and the intermediary, the in-between state, whether in architectural designs and their decors (curtains, brick walls, holes in the wood), or in the body and its sensory organs (nose, mouth, ear). Bodies and architecture are joined and fused – a knot in a piece of wood assumes the shape of an ear, an ear becomes the capital of a column, and a column sprouts arms, while the veins of painted marble conjure up skin.

Originating in her interest in the link between the body and architecture, a recurring element in the artist’s repertoire of visual tropes is the figure of the caryatid. In ancient Greece, the caryatid (literally “maidens of Karyai,” a town in the Peloponnese) was a sculpted female figure often draped in a long tunic; supporting an entablature on her head, the caryatid often took the place of a column or pillar in buildings. By reappropriating this figure, Sarah Margnetti interrogates the historical fusion of female bodies and architecture. She uses the caryatid to lend visual form to the question of the invisible effort put in by women to uphold the stability of the economic and social edifice of our world.

Indeed, as Camilla Paolino writes in a fine essay published in the exhibition catalogue, “the caryatid’s functionality depends on her ability to do as if the feat of carrying the weight of the system were effortless, that is, on her capacity to keep the labor she performs concealed: an unfathomable, unthinkable arcane. In order to preserve the arcane, the caryatid must remain still and silent. If she speaks, the building trembles. If she makes a move, the building collapses […] However, Sarah Margnetti’s caryatids are not only a tribute to women’s disregarded labors. They are also meant to address the work deployed to support the world of art and culture, which thrives on the unrecognized labor of populous ranks of invisible workers.”

Curated by Nicole Schweizer, Curator of contemporary art, MCBA

Biography
Sarah Margnetti holds a Bachelor of Arts degree in Visual Arts from the École cantonale d’art de Lausanne / ECAL (2005-2009) and a Master’s in Visual Arts HES-SO, Work.Master from the Geneva University of Art and Design / HEAD (2013 – 2015). She also completed a practical training course at the Institut Van der Kelen-Logelain in Brussels, a school devoted to the study of decorative painting. She is the recipient of the Manor Art Prize 2022 Vaud and the Swiss Art Award 2018. Her work has been exhibited in a range of institutions and venues, including Le Commun, Geneva; CAN, Neuchâtel; La Villa du Parc, Annemasse; Last Tango, Zurich; SALTS, Basel; and Stems Gallery, Brussels.

Publication
Nicole Schweizer (ed.), Sarah Margnetti. Sintonia, with a text by Camilla Paolino, co-published by Musée cantonal des Beaux-Arts de Lausanne and art&fiction publications, Lausanne, 2022 (Fr./Eng.), 144 pp., 80 ill.

Price: 35 CHF / 30 CHF at the MCBA Book- and Giftshop during the exhibition
shop.mcba [​at​] plateforme10.ch

Event
Performance by Julia Perazzini: 
Waves On
Thursday, January 26, 2023, 7pm

Limited capacity. Register online: mcba.ch

For more information on the full public program: mcba.ch/en/agenda

For press and images: mcba.ch/en/press/

Acknowledgement
The exhibition and publication have been realised thanks to the generous support of the Manor Culture Prize 2022 Vaud.