What draws our attention first – the glint of a lure, or the tale it appears to promise? For Tales and Reals, Magali Reus turns to the coastal landscape of her youth, which also forms the backdrop to Museum Beelden Aan Zee, The Hague, NL. Drawing on the area’s cultural, industrial and natural landscape and history, the artist has created three interconnected bodies of twenty-one sculptural works: Merlin (2024), Streamers (2025) and Rig (2025).
At first glance, these works resemble familiar objects: larger-than-life sardine tins, maritime skeletal remains, fishing hooks and earrings. Yet a closer look makes what seems real begin to ‘reel’. Layered with meaning and alluring details, these objects use their seductive forces to hook and reel us in – literally and metaphorically. Playing with the flirtatious potential of silhouettes, they function as baits: enticements that at- tract us while the inevitable awaits – the moment the lure turns into a snare that fools and entraps.
Reus stages these objects within a set of charged tensions: between interior and exterior space, the domesticated and the wild, openness and confinement. For the exhibition display, each work carries its own identification code. This ordering principle echoes the opaque logic of the container-coding systems in the nearby Scheveningen seaport.
In these recent works, Reus deepens her engagement with ecology and with systems of production and consumption. As the climate emergency intensifies, it becomes increasingly difficult to separate the objects we use and the produce we consume from their environmental impact, or to imagine our coastal and domestic lives without recognising multi-species relationships. Reus’ sculptures prompt us to consider the com- plex entanglements between nature, technology and the consequences of post-industrial human activity.
MERLIN, 2024
Rings pulled back and forcefully split-open lids reveal the contents of these unexpectedly large sardine tins, each adorned with seductive imagery reminiscent of souvenir seaside postcards. Instead of holding the day’s catch preserved in oil or brine, they cradle an array of unexpected items beneath their raised lids. Associated with preservation, consumption and the aesthetics of mass production, the sculptures – designed both to trap and to catch the eye – make us question whether they protect, imprison, offer or withhold whatever lies inside.
Proportionally enlarged, they also evoke the scale of pet beds, collapsing distinctions between produce, pets, pests and people. At once humorous and unsettling, the Merlins disrupt familiar habitats and roles, exposing how proximity can blur the boundaries between care and consumption, affection and animosity within the shared domestic sphere.
STREAMERS, 2025
Evocative of skeletal remains of fish that might have found their final resting place on the seabed or on our plates, the Streamers become relics of former lives. Yet rather than serving as mournful silhouettes, they lean towards celebration. Coloured in dark green, blue and brown washes, upright and distinctively animated, their pine-like silhouettes, dotted with colourful accents reminiscent of festive lights and ornaments, subtly evoke the familiar Christmas tree and domestic winter rituals.
Scaled to our bodies, they meet us on equal terms, asking whether what we consume is as important as what we consider ourselves to be, hinting at the cyclical interdependence that binds all living beings. The tension between natural and mechanical elements – such as the industrially inspired joints – invites reflection on how we move through intertwined cycles of consumption and regeneration.
RIG, 2025
Nine oversized hooks with companion lures dangle directly from the walls like earrings or fishing tackle. Alluring yet dangerous, their shapes and seductive colours, surfaces and shine draw us closer. And, once nearer, their hooks make us aware of our position as prey: we are the diner, the admirer, the one looked at while looking.
Caught between leisure and sustenance, fishing – whether practised as a pastime or to feed hungry diners – becomes a stage for the subtle dynamics of courtship: the play of attraction and, ultimately, of capture. But the vocabulary extends beyond aquatic life. The human body, too, hosts hooks and lures. Earrings, anchored to flesh like bait, solicit attention, tethering the wearer to systems of exchange, display and, ultimately, desire.
ABOUT THE ARTIST
Magali Reus (b. 1981, The Hague, the Netherlands) lives and works in London. Combining traditional craft techniques with industrial manufacture, she creates series of sculptural forms that spring from everyday objects. In her hands, these objects shed their original functions and physical traits while exploring, expanding or even contradicting the cultural histories they carry, becoming what she refers to as “disobedient objects that perform a different image of themselves.” With a compelling, open-ended symbolism, the works explore how simple forms can spark immediate and novel chains of association – to people, places, smells and sounds.
Reus has exhibited widely, and her work is held in major museum collections worldwide, including the Tate (UK), the Nasher Sculpture Center (US) and the Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam (NL). Her practice has received significant recognition, among them the 7th Arnaldo Pomodoro Sculpture Prize (IT, 2024) and the Prix de Rome (NL, 2015). In 2018, she was shortlisted for the Hepworth Prize for Sculpture (UK).
