exhibition views at Artopia Gallery, Milan
19th June - 15th July 2022​ 
 

While working on the re-articulation of a historically favorite subject Marianne Vierø does not fail to squeeze in a play on words: does she mean drawing a nude or drawing while nude? or better, drawing a nude while naked? While amusing the visitor with a double entendre, a deeper message is conveyed. Collective and personal memory, “studium” and “punctum”, conscious and unconscious meet to form new alliances. A point, which comes back in her work methodology. The application of one medium’s features to another grant the possibility for a renewed origin and a dismantling of categories. Constantly, almost inevitably Vierø combines and hybridizes different artistic languages. From the graft created indefinite, or rather indefinable, works that fluctuate between mediums are generated.

Most prominently, a group of canvases titled Loom Paintings (Unweaving) tie together references to textile art and painting. In these works, with strong tactile suggestions, Vierø preserves the physicality of the raw canvas while untangling the threads that compose it and applying extremely diluted paint to the surface as if dyeing the fabric. With the sculptures named Untitled, Nude (Breadwinner), Vierø shapes the dough into different sections of the body, evoking the porosity of skin while questioning the position of the nude as a compliant object for study. Situated straight on the gallery floor a set of LED illuminated acrylic sheets titled allude to the shape of a sleeve represented both as a schematic sewing pattern and as a silhouetted gesture. Engaging in a play of embodiment and detachment the overlapping sheets hover between figurative representation and abstraction. Finally, two small drawings in mirror and gouache lines frames make out the title pieces of the show. Insisting on drawing the viewer into the conversation, they reflect on the polarity between seeing and being seen. Vierø’s research acts on the process of the translation of expressive languages by dealing with the iconographic model of the nude and through the history of art. Elements specific to certain fields and heterogeneous processes trigger unprecedented experiments that take the form of unexpected formal results.