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These Cabinets of Curiosity Are at Once Primeval and Present-Day
Emerging throughout Renaissance Europe as conspicuous displays of wealth and knowledge, wunderkammers, or cabinets of curiosity, contained carefully amassed collections of oddities, natural elements, and era-distinctive examples of material culture. The reserve of particularly learned rulers, aristocrats, members of the clergy, and scholarly scientists, these encyclopedic assemblages of religious relics and antiquities were often housed within sumptuously adorned, holistically themed environments.
As time progressed and spatial scale reduced significantly, the act of considered hoarding moved from rooms into furnishings: intricately compartmentalized cabinets.
Returning to this age-old paradigm while also playing up that shift is polymathic Belgian artist Katrien Van Der Schueren. Rendered in her idiosyncratic, hand-carved fragments, the new The Ark of Us wall-sculpture series transforms the traditionally elite and showy wunderkammer practice into one that feels more widespread and discreetly personal.
Though decidedly maximalist in aesthetic and formation, these puzzle-like reliefs conceal secret chambers, perfectly suited to hold anything meaningful one might want to store away for safekeeping. The sum of many parts, a single mural can conceptually become a portrait, composed of held artifacts that each represent a different lived experience.
Presented at former fashion entrepreneur Lisa Perry’s residential gallery concept, Onna House, in East Hampton, the intricately adorned panels — both architectonic and molten — captivate against the stark white, modernist interior. They are strikingly articulated by natural light flooding in through floor-to-ceiling windows and large skylights.
The works are presented as part of the group exhibition In Her Hands: From Marble to Wood, on view through July 12. They were previously shown by Galerie JAG at PAD Paris in early April.
Van Der Schueren creates these unified, almost fossil-like compositions by physically cohering natural wood, stone, metal, plaster, resin, and pigment. Pushing the conventional limits of the craft techniques involved, she creates complexly detailed topographies––worlds in and of themselves.
To learn more about this and other programming, visit onnahouse.com.
Photography by Rodrigo Rize.
