Artist: Martin Maeller
Exhibition title: Nervous Dust
Curated by: Vincent Schier
Venue: Kunstverein Göttingen, Göttingen, Germany
Date: July 15 – August 28, 2022
Photography: All works courtesy the artist. Images by Lucas Melzer, © Kunstverein Göttingen
In the exhibition Nervous Dust Martin Maeller examines questions of identity, sensitivity and vulnerability, and addresses the relationship between private and public mourning. He develops his works from personal memories, mythology and pop culture to explore collective experiences of loss, processes of alienation, and the search for belonging.
In his artistic work, Maeller interweaves reality with fiction, revealing not only contradictions, but also blurring notions of social conventions, and at times referring to people who, by virtue of their own identity, see themselves as disconnected from the world. His sculptures function as expressions of queer grief, drawing form and content from nonconforming processes of commemoration. Through the use of organic and industrial materials, and the altering and reinterpreting of everyday objects, he connects things that, at first glance, do not seem to belong together. Maeller’s works appear smooth and reduced; and at the same time, they are also intimate and intuitive: heat-shrinkable rubber tubing is reminiscent of lifeless branches, vessels with figurative elements resemble mummification jars, printed cubes made of acrylic glass evoke reliquaries.
In his exhibition, Maeller gathers ambivalent inner worlds – between melancholy and repression, affection and care – and, in the process, allows new forms of personal experience to emerge. His works seem like fragments of a gloomy world of thought, like poetic set pieces that contrast the physical world. The exhibition Nervous Dust opens up alternative perspectives and puts the focus on topics that exist on the fringes of social discourse.
