Marije de Wit
Marije de Wit’s (b. 1979, the Netherlands) work has from its beginning shown her contemplative attitude on sculpture, its presentation and its relationship to the world around it.
In her earlier works, she combined sculptural elements with pedestal-like objects into playful games of display, always bringing about the question of who is showing whom. By combining artistic materials with readymade objects of everyday life, the question arises also what is art and what is its entourage.
Through all this, every part of each work challenges the outlines of the autonomous, the decorative and the functional. The questioning of these traditional understandings and definitions and the challenging of their outlines represents De Wit’s desire to not only look at these fundamentals of sculpture less statically, but also look anew at what seems self-evident in our surrounding world.
For the same reasons De Wit’s work has expanded to also include a reflection on the working processes that take place in the studio. In the visual sense, De Wit poses questions of what images and abstraction really are and how we come to the value and definitions we assign to them. She often uses photography to monitor the process in the studio. It allows identifying moments in which images actually arise out of all the action that take place there. This enables De Wit to visualize the questioning of when we define images as images.
Now that the consequences of neoliberal policies trickle down to every level of society, De Wit experiences its exaggerated defining, rationalizing and objectifying functioning in each domain, also in the arts. Since she thinks that this only leads to alienation, as a counterweight she wants to see her work as an interface between thinking about the world and the world as it supposedly is. Especially as a space where no definitions are awarded yet, thus where everything can be considered and questioned.
