Artist Maren Hassinger Mourns Our Lost Connection With The Natural World | Frieze

For Frieze Magazine, I review the first UK solo exhibition of groundbreaking post-minimalist sculptor and performance artist, Maren Hassinger, at Tiwani Contemporary, London.

Excerpt:

“The elegant waves of Hassinger’s densely-packed wire rope sculptures reverberate with the uninterrupted flow of her delicate, cursive handwriting. In four A4 drawings at the gallery’s back corner, she repeatedly inscribes certain words, her scrawls evoking the sublimity and dynamism of the natural environment both in form and meaning.  ‘Ocean’, ‘savannah’, ‘wind’ and ‘whisper’ fill the entirety of each page in rows and columns. Echoing the aesthetic of concrete poetry, Hassinger pays careful attention to the spatial organization of letters on paper – a formal sensibility that harkens back to her sculptural practice. Meanwhile, the seemingly endless repetition of the words shows a minimalist and conceptualist affinity for seriality. Yet Hassinger subverts the de-personalized, mechanical aesthetic through her manual inscriptions. We can almost hear her calmly and rhythmically pronouncing the words, again and again, each time with a different intonation.”

Cover Artwork: Maren Hassinger, Consolation, 1996, wire and wire rope. Courtesy: Susan Inglett Gallery, New York and Tiwani Contemporary, London; photograph: Adam Reich, New York