MARIA RUBINKE – IT’S BETTER TO BURN OUT THAN TO FADE AWAY
2014-04-14The pure white porcelain surface attracts the gaze of the viewer, but at the same time distorts our presuppositions when the small porcelain girls are slowly broken down and subjected to contrast-filled madness. They sink down and seem to drown in the thick mud of the bog and are fatally bitten by a snake. Like the Surrealists, Maria Rubinke thematizes the complexity of the human psyche and works in a formal idiom all her own.
The exhibition has been created throughout the artist’s 27th year – a year that has offered emotional ups and downs. With inspiration from ‘Club 27’, the group of legendary artists who lost their lives at the age of 27, combined with her own experience, Maria Rubinke subjects her innocent little china girl to a process of decomposition until she has quite vanished and only the delicate little shoes remain, slowly consumed by an army of ants.
Maria Rubinke works in an extremely structured way, but for this exhibition has for the first time let go from the beginning of the creative process and let the works slowly create themselves as she worked through her own personal crisis. This is why there are also traces of a kind of panic throughout the exhibition, which reflects the emotional plunge the artist has undergone – Rubinke has let go, let the dark, gloomy thoughts find expression in the porcelain, ending with a rebirth. This is manifested in the sculpture I died a hundred times, which shows the porcelain girl standing on a heap of black skulls, carrying a small infant whose umbilical cord has not yet been cut. The title of the sculpture is a quotation from the singer Amy Winehouse – a ‘member’ of Club 27.
Exhibition runs through to May 17th, 2014
Martin Asbæk Gallery
Bredgade 23
DK-1260 Copenhagen
Denmark
