two points that were close can become very distant.media.withtank.com/94357aa1f6.pdfmasters, Ryuichi...

If you take a handkerchief and spread it out in order to iron it, you can see in it certain fixed distances and proximities. If you sketch a circle in one area, you can mark out nearby points and measure far-off distances. Then take the same handkerchief and crumple it, by putting it in your pocket. Two distant points suddenly are close, even superimposed. If, further, you tear it in certain places, two points that were close can become very distant. (Michel Serres & Bruno Latour 1995:60)

Suspended in flux, in contortions of disorder,in the frozen acrobatics of folding and faults,the earth mourns itself.Continents torn in half and turned into coastlines,call for themselves across the sea.Caves, frantic for air, pull themselves upby the ground, fields collapsing into empty sockets.Everywhere the past juts into the present;mountains burst from one era to another,or crumple up millennia, time joining at its ends.(Anne Michaels, 1991:111)

In looking at an object, we reach out for it. With an invisible finger we move through the space around us. (Rudolf Arnheim, 1956:33)

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at once optically dynamic, abstract painting surfaces, but are also secretive still life objects; objects that withhold their contents as they fold in on themselves.

In a series of threaded drawings, Marx uses cotton thread to render the distorted gridlines of crumpled stationery paper. The markings on standard stationery, the distinctive pale blue lines of writing paper, or the denser Irish margin, crossed by the gentle pink margin line on the left, or the fertile green weave of graph paper, carries a tinge of nostalgia that belie the stark neutrality of paper that awaits inscription. But Marx does not inscribe, instead she crumples the paper, and then carefully records the disrupted surfaces by rendering the now twisted grids in cotton thread painstakingly stitched into paper. The threaded drawings map the distorted grids in a dense weave of straight stitch-lines that become web-like, at times a dense weave; a net that holds in its distorted lace the illusory presence of an absent volume.

Arnheim, R. 1956. Art And Visual Perception: A Psychology of the Creative Eye. University of California Press.

Michaels, A. 1991. The Weight of Oranges: Miner’s Pond. Toronto: McClelland & Steward Ltd.

Serres, M. & Latour, B. 1995. Conversations on Science, Culture and Time. Trans. R. Lapidus. Ann Arbour: University of Michigan Press.

For her first solo exhibition with Whatiftheworld Gallery, Maja Marx presents Fold – a selection of new paintings, drawings, objects and monotype prints. Her latest body of work is a study of disrupted surfaces, and comprises of an examination into the properties of text, line, flatness and depth. In her work, notions of the Fold is explored through a fundamental process of modification – Marx purposefully disrupts the flatness of inscribed surfaces; by crumpling paper or folding cloth, the inherent flatness of the surfaces become topographical, dimensional volumes. Marx’s works are meticulous studies of these affected texts; by painting these, or by tracing the warped gridlines on a folded sheet of stationery paper with thread, she maps these new topographies into a renewed flatness. In the folding or crumpling of text the inscribed surface becomes object, the text is abstracted and fragmented as it folds over

ridges, or disappears into the depth of a fold. Legibility is hidden in the facets of the crumpled surface, but still these constructed topographies, like mountainous landscapes, are haunted by the lost legibility of texts, which only an imagined return to flatness could restore. In this manner Marx forces the viewer’s gaze to fluctuate between looking (as one would look at a painting), and reading (as one would read a text).

Inspired by the Renaissance convention of the cartellino (Italian for ‘little paper’) a small creased or folded piece of paper bearing an inscription that is painted to appear like a real piece of paper, pasted on the surface of the painting itself, Marx’s paintings exaggerate this subtle illusionism.

The multiple texts that she collects; from carefully selected quotes to mundane statements found on discarded bits of paper, are rendered into works that are

MAJA MARX: FOLD

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obvious formal qualities which, as much as they draw on drawing, possess a material quality which radically extends on what we ordinarily associate with ‘drawing’ as a descriptor for an artwork. Collectively, they evoke the simultaneous frozen and fluid condition of shape-shifting glacial landscapes: manually constructed Google Earth tracings of imaginary planetary surfaces. They appear like more sympathetic versions of Thomas Jefferson’s relentless Cartesian grid (1885, until the present),the strict matrix of which pretends that the American surface is idealistically flat and, with the imperialist confidence of a ‘blind’ bird’s eye perspective, treats the unique aspects of that landscape with neutralising disdain.

Marx’s filigree constructed conversations between paper and thread resemble, in their skeletal ‘emptiness’, a new flexible framework for a not-yet-invented musical

notation. The peaks and troughs — captured in the final works – in which the artist patiently mimics the folds and creases of the carefully crumpled pages which ‘pose’ as inert models for translation, seem to embody the tremors of a secret sonic experiment. The tensions existing between spanning thread and calculatedly pierced paper evoke a possible map for a new collaboration between say, contemporary electronic masters, Ryuichi Sakamoto and Alva Noto. In a curious inversion of the traditional sculptural norm the paper, criss-crossed by the thread, is the actual armature which lays bare what we initially and instinctively read as support, namely the thread. Despite their small physical size, these works allude to a sculptural and potentially endless magnitude: Marcel Duchamp’s installation of 1942, Mile of String, comes to mind. Just as the real fold of the landscape – to which the philosopher Gilles

For a transcript of the full interview with Joseph Kosuth, in which the artist reflects retrospectively on the value of his own practice, see: Archer, M. 2010. Joseph Kosuth – Interviewed by Michael Archer (London, 1994), in Speaking of Art: Four decades of Art in Conversation, edited by W Furlong. New York: Phaidon Press Inc. :126–129.

For a brief overview of Marx’s earlier output and the importance of the fold within the ongoing development of her work, see: Opper, A. 2009. Patiently Calculated, Conceptually Applied. Art South Africa. 8(2):32–33. Summer.

THE SEDUCTION OF COLLAPSE

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In an interview with Joseph Kosuth1 in 1994 the artist openly describes the works by himself he enjoys the most as “perhaps spectacular failures” (Furlong, 2010:129). A sense of Kosuth’s predilection for the ways in which language, philosophy and form often cross each other is mirrored in a cross-section of the work produced by artist Maja Marx, over the last five years or so. In this current body of work, as well as much of the work which has preceded it, Marx has been seduced by failure in the sense that the fold, so quintessential to her output2 is synonymous with the uneasiness of failure or, otherwise stated, collapse. Just as Kosuth (2010:129) values productive failure over the deceptive ease of making signature style works, so Marx exploits and overturns the notions of surface and depth, only to reveal more questions than to provide the satisfaction of uncomplicated answers.

The Fold And Its Underneaths

Marx’s reference to a selection of her works – made of networks of thread – as ‘drawings’ highlight the pitfalls of categorisation and false expectation given by the art market’s often narrow frame. The ostensibly minimalist thread-based works are anything but threadbare: a cursory glance at these works reveals their

UNFOLDING THE WORK OF MAJA MARx

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the complexities disguised by oversimplified readings of territory and territoriality. In this sense they talk about an archaeology of tugging and tearing at sensitive fold-lines, which become rifts: opportunities for digging and exploring the real and symbolic underneaths of things.

Ungrounded

An example of this archaeological approach is epitomised by a work which belongs to what Marx refers to as ‘objects’, within the oeuvre that comprises the current show. Heap: Earth (2010) quantifies the artificial repetition of the temporary removal of earthly matter from a specifically generic site, a cemetery. A total of 31 woven blankets each carry the image of loose soil, temporarily removed from the Earth at large, for the making of a grave. These photographically flattened reproductions of displaced earth are stacked to make an idealised volume of ground: a heap of earth. This work represents a multiplicitous presence which uncannily embodies a double absence: the temporary absence of the documented soil on the surfaces of the blankets, from the voided space of the empty grave; and the permanent absence of the body which that grave now contains. The work simultaneously reveals and hides the subaltern and subterranean underneaths alluded to by the universal fold which binds and separates existences, life and death.

This work’s modular basis, as well as the absence of the artist’s hand in its actual execution, places it along a trajectory which links it to earlier works of Minimalism. This connection is rhizomatic rather than linear. Despite the ostensible lifelessness of the subject matter, Marx’s object – in the larger tradition of the importance of the object for Minimalism – may be read as a development of the cool Minimalist tradition: an example of something one might refer to as Warm Minimalism. By way of Heap: Earth’s obvious figurative reference to matter, it manages to undo the direct coolness embodied in, for instance, the real presence of material in the modular assemblies of someone like Carl André (Marx’s literal image reference to soil would no doubt irritate André and the other die-hards of Minimalism). Materially, the anthropomorphic and warm associations which blankets, as objects in the world, allude to negate the cool abstraction which most of the adherents of earlier Minimalism subscribed to. The thin yet obvious border around each blanket

Deleuze attaches such great value – is able to effortlessly transgress the ostensible limitations of borders, so Marx’s threaded constructions interrogate the painterly ‘ownership’ of the genres of still life and landscape. In these works, the architectures of appearance and reality are complicated, or folded together (as the Latin origin of the word complicate suggests), challenging the way we ordinarily read and interpret the real and imagined landscapes of the everyday.

These particular works create sites for sight: that is, places for the eye to travel across, muse on and, possibly, come to rest. Significantly the title of the show is Fold, but Marx develops and exacerbates this complex phenomenon into the crease, in reference to works which display or represent a tighter and messier condition of disruption to the depicted surface construct. These works make starkly visible Deleuze’s fascination with the universal fold, embodying space, movement and time, by zooming in on imagined pieces of a larger fold. Marx’s ‘drawn’ investigations hint at a system of infinitely linked nomadic movement inherent in contemporary society, along the landscape- and information-based folds which describe our current and ever-shifting reality. Her thread-based works subliminally re-verse the underneath of the fold, revealing a second crucial Deleuzian concept, namely the rhizome:

These lines, or ligaments, should not be confused with lineages of the aborescent type, which are merely localizable linkages between points and positions. Unlike the graphic arts, drawing or photography, unlike tracings, the rhizome pertains to a map that must be produced, constructed, a map that is always detachable, connectable, reversible, modifiable, and has multiple entranceways and exits and its own lines of flight. (Deleuze & Guattari, 1987:23).3

Marx’s fold- and crease-prone ‘maps’ illustrate the rhizomic multiplicity which Deleuze argues for. With the concept of the rhizome (versus the root or radicle) Deleuze aims to arrest and disrupt the notion of the book as a simple or single

“image of the world” (Deleuze & Guattari, 1987:4–7). Fittingly many of Marx’s thread-based works – such as Single Fold: Irish Margin (2011) – refer literally to unscripted books, with the full potential for cyclical oscillation between moments of marking and erasure, “deterritorialisation and reterritorialisation” (Deleuze & Guattari 1987:59–63). Marx’s representations of folds unfold, expose and disembody

For an extensive reading of the significance of the rhizome to Deleuze’s thinking, see Deleuze, G & Guattari, F. 1987. A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, Vol. 2. Trans. by Brian Massumi. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

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and complicated into that which is illegible, or at least not conventionally legible. The resultant failure or collapse of the ideally flat text sets up topographies of varying degrees of textual proximity, distance and intersection. The logic of legibility is sacrificed for the subjectivity of landscape – a poetically uncompromising notion alluded to in many of the titles referring to works on the current show. Nearness and distance combine to short circuit a given text into an abstraction of itself – text touches text.

In these works of depicted folded-ness, the irrefutable textual precision of an On Kawara or a Hanne Darboven are not to be found. Neither does the self-assured rejection of an aesthetic painterly tradition (at the end of the 1950s and beginning of the 1960s), embodied by Frank Stella’s reductively-driven dictum of “What you see is what you see.” (Rubin, 1987:14) apply here. Text and surface are undermined, buried in fact. Previously clean relationships become invariably messy. The uncanny emergence of a surrealist-like poem of non-sense leaves the viewer of the painted depiction longing for a memory of flatness and the comforts we associate with its inherently convenient legibility. The resultant ebb and flow between (attempted) reading and viewing of Marx’s painted works remind one of the concrete poetry epitomised so effectively in Willem Boshoff’s Kyk Afrikaans series (1978–2003).

The loss, or rather invisibility, of text in Marx’s paintings belong to the lineage of useless patches of left-over space, referred to on maps as ‘uitvalgrond’ – non-spaces, usually triangular and characteristically awkward in their Bermuda-like insistence not to conform and to remain exterritorial at all costs. The stillness of Marx’s painted still lifes remains still, and impossible to navigate; the painted flatness of her canvases deny the viewer a possible return to a flattening-out of estranged texts, and only heightens feelings of alienation which viewers of these works inevitably experience. There are no clues or solutions to the ‘murder’ of the text: unfolding is an absolute impossibility.

Consequently the heterotopian5 (Foucault, 1967:[sp]) conditions buried within the depths of the inaccessible folds of these paintings, extend on and complicate the painterly exchange of inside-outside at the core of René Magritte’s famous and deceptively flat surrealist painting of 1933, The Human Condition: the folds and shadows of Marx’s Red Stone series harbour a David Lynch-like uncertainty and

reinforces its thing-ness and simultaneously the artificiality of the image each blanket carries, heightening its yielding quality. Marx’s piece refers to the haptic ‘softness’ of many of Eva Hesse’s works, as well as the figurative allusions embodied in the works of Anne Truitt. Both Marx’s predecessors could be considered productively anachronistic in the sense that the work they produced (during the mid to late 1960s and early 1970s), offered a counter-current to the cooler objects of André, Donald Judd, Sol LeWitt, and other more celebrated artists associated with the origins of what became known as Minimalism.

This particular work of Marx’s is even more absorbing when considering a reading of its position relative to some of her large-scale land art experiments outside of the white cube context. Heap: Earth might be read as a compelling art-historical reference: in this work she re-imports masses of (simulated) dirty earth, from its original context, into the pristine context of the gallery; this action could be interpreted as a cleverly audacious re-visiting of the literal filling of the gallery with earth, as embodied by Walter de Maria’s New York Earth Room of 1977 (first installed in Münich in 1968). Marx condenses de Maria’s grand gesture by concealing pieces of repetitive flecks of ‘earth’ under themselves – a formal mode which seems to borrow from the way that the plinth-like stacks of consumable posters, in the work of Felix Gonzalez-Torres, challenge the norm of the traditionally constructed divide between art work and art viewer. Although the duplicitous layers of Marx’s work are not designed to be taken from the exhibition (as is the case with Gonzalez-Torres), as an equally thought-provoking work, they do thicken the conundrum of ownership and consumption in the sense that these notions become impossibilities after death, an inevitability which this work inescapably refers to.

Far away, so close4

Marx’s paintings of disrupted paper and cloth surfaces – of which Two Points (2009) and more recently Red Stone 1 (2011), are good examples respectively – employ the depiction of flatness folded, that is, the conversion of planes to crumpled volumes. The original Cartesian textual clarity, which goes hand in hand with text printed on flat surfaces, is compromised by the ‘topological interference’, as Marx calls it, caused by the crumpling of paper, or cloth. The legible is lost, or rather translated

The sub-heading for this part of the essay on Marx’s work uses Wim Wenders’s 1993 film, Faraway, so Close (German: In weiter Ferne, so nah!), to reference two examples of folding which interrogate notions of distance and proximity: namely, the folding together of the heavenly and earthly realms; and the joining of East and West Berlin.

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unknowing which is unsettling in the way that clarity is blurred and a formerly legible script is irreversibly undone. The presence in these paintings of a strange built-in tabula rasa-like collapse of previously clear meaning denies any sort of new beginning: instead, the resultant painterly riddles resemble unsettling guessing games, permanently commencing and simultaneously always already over.

In her growing folded oeuvre, Marx consciously confronts the drawbacks and possible rewards of failure. She curates the fold – her crumples, creases and other versions of collapse are constructed, composed and named. Collectively these pieces of folds are interrogative versions of each other and are constituently analogous of the ambivalent and unfathomable universal fold, which encapsulates and describes the concurrent unfolding and collapse of existence. Her uncannily seductive creations are searches for clues which are not easily or comfortably graspable, but elusive, slippery and schizophrenically unavailable.

Alexander Opper is an architect, artist and writer. He holds a Senior Lectureship in the Department of Architecture at the University of Johannesburg’s (UJ) Faculty of Art, Design and Architecture (FADA), where he has taught since 2007. In this context he assumed the directorship of a new Masters programme in architecture, in 2011. His creative outputs and writings have been published widely, both nationally and internationally. In his design practice and teaching he explores relationships across traditionally separate disciplines such as art, architecture and furniture design. His current artistic practice focuses on the mutually dependent overlaps and connections of the theory and production of architecturally inspired installation environments.

Deleuze, G. & Guattari, F. 1987. A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. Vol. 2. Trans. by Brian Massumi. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

Foucault, M. 1967. Of Other Spaces. Architecture, Mouvement, Continuité (Architecture, Movement, Continuity). October 1984(5):46–49. Trans. by Jay Miskowiec. [O]. Available: Accessed: 24 August 2011.

Furlong, W. (ed). 2010. Speaking of Art: Four Decades of Art in Conversation. New York: Phaidon Press Inc.

Opper, A. 2009. Patiently Calculated, Conceptually Applied. Art South Africa. 8(2).32–33. Summer.

Rubin, W. S. 1987. Frank Stella, 1970–1987. Exhibition Catalogue. New York: Museum of Modern Art.

Wenders, W. (dir). 1993. Faraway, So Close. [Film]. Tobis Film GMBH & Co. KG; Road Movies Filmproduktion.

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structured around cultural signs; geographically signs are synonymous with city streets and grids, landmarks, mountains, rivers, territories and borders.

Marx recovers these regimes of grids, words and signs from trash-heaps and archives, and proceeds with herculean efforts to re-create them, and through this re-articulation, slippages in medium, transpositions and translations reveal its ominous and even militant origins. By bending a straight line, collapsing a logical sentence and disfiguring a flat surface their original natures are brought to the foreground; their ‘naturalizing’ spells are broken. The violence of the original rigid geometries are made visible with a sleight of hand, but simultaneously, anchors are unmoored and ‘signs’ are set adrift.

Marx’s objects are intricately worked; surfaces punctured, threads laced, looped, tensioned and knotted, oils brush-feathered and blended, the tactile

craft carefully orchestrating illusions. This process folds grids, lines and language back on itself, and release them into a poetic space, where associations glide from one referent to another. A page filled with empty musical staves resembles a delineated landscape, awaiting newly de-territorialized musical notations. One can just imagine, floundering fugues and drifting glissandi. Elsewhere grids contracts and expands on its horizontals and verticals, the folds tracing a process and carefully breaking the orthogonal rhythm of its remembered symmetry.

In the relief prints, letters are decoded into tentative geometric hieroglyphs; folded, fractured and scattered, creating an aggregate of abstract marks, caught in a dance between two and three dimensions. Oil paint creates surfaces as rich and thick as velvet, letters folded in baroque marble drapes. Language is again reclaimed

With Fold, Maja Marx conjures a series of representational problems and their elegant solutions, as if they were two sides of a Möbius band. Tactile materials, printed images, photographs and texts are all carefully and painstakingly folded back on themselves to create liminal forms that deface its origins as soon as they are declared. By re-articulating seemingly insignificant artefacts and detritus, the artist initiates complex dialogues between structures, language, social semiotics and the intimacy of personal objects.

Letters, words, grammars, grids, frameworks, constraints, determinants, constructs... Marx’s work invokes language in all its discreet and varied guises, and transforms these militant regimes of signs and structures that demand obedience into fluid, shifting, tactile surfaces and optical apparitions.

A letter has to have a certain shape, a specific

curve; it cannot be mirrored, folded or twisted, and is allocated a specific position within a word. Words are locked together in a grammar, logical sentences into paragraphs, all the while floating on the ubiquitous grid. An unassuming margin in light pink gives the first order, from there it marches across the page in a regular rhythm of feint blue lines; and it comes as no surprise that the primary definition of feint is: “A feigned attack designed to draw defensive action away from an intended target... A deceptive action calculated to divert attention from one’s real purpose.”*

The assimilation into a culture of language operates by these oblique and sometimes innocent mechanisms, the joy of parents upon hearing their child speak his or her first word, school reports that reflect hours upon hours of neat words in the right order in straight lines. Signs dominate our lives, social communities are

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interpreting a landscape can be a matter of life and death; following a ridge to a valley to a riverbed to dig for water, or refugees negotiating ethnic and cultural territories to find a temporary safe haven. Marx’s orthogonal contours slips over hills and into valleys, but the hypnotic visual rhythm of line, crumple and fold invokes more sinister undertones; territoriality, ownership, inheritance, borders, class stratifications and ethnic segregations. These human dramas are acted out in spoken, written and geographic languages; the language of fences, borders, customs, territories, cultural lineages and their relationship to land, soil and erosion, mining and exploitation, declining resources and collapsing ecosystems.

In Heap: Earth the artist returns to the image of an eroded landscape photographically transferred onto a pile of blankets. Here, as in Heap: Paper (an installation consisting of a pile of 31 blankets representing the empty pages of an exercise book) the dialogue between form and content is caught in a fierce loop. A blanket can be a prerequisite for survival on a cold winter night, the ubiquitous feint and margin with all its references to the initiation into the symbolic order becomes equally concrete and essential to negotiate existence.

Is it possible that Marx’s work, through its undoing of language, becomes a kind of writing itself? Paper to eye to hand, the all too familiar weaving of repetition and variation, marks quoting marks, abstraction slyly becoming signs... Fold is an exhibition that follows an aesthetically narrow path, visually preoccupied with its subtle effacements, quiet linear disruptions and translations. But it is precisely these visual refinements that act as decoys that cast an oblique view onto the poetry and violence of geometry, language and structure.

Stefanus Rademeyer is a South African artist who explores the interdisciplinary fields of art, science and philosophy. He holds a Masters degree in Fine Arts and Art Theory from the University of the Witwatersrand, and has been a practicing artist for over 10 years. His last solo exhibition titled Resonant Structures presented a synthesis of geometry, biology and simulated structural processes by utilizing computer based algorithmic visualization techniques. He is represented by the Goodman Gallery.

* www.thefreedictionary.com/feint

to the realm of form and surface, losing its signifying powers. Crumpled and folded materials hover in a void, creating a visually tactile world that is populated with highlights, shadows, textures, veils, solids and edges.

A line can be described as an accumulation of an infinite series of points, a grid as a series of orthogonal lines, always already implying repetition ad infinitum, the visual caption is a synecdoche. Language is acquired and maintained through endless repetition, its hegemony stretches across time and space. In Horizontal Saccade 3: Irish Margin the artist hints at these abysmal recursions, element interlocking with element and form upon form. These playful formal arrangements also hint at the relationship between text and textile, were countless threads are interlaced, suggesting weaving patterns created with a loom.

The words ‘text’, ‘textile’ and ‘texture’ have their origin in the Latin word ‘texere’, which refers to the process of weaving. It is within this etymological chiasmus that one can locate Marx’s ‘embroideries’. The metaphor jumps between different signifying registers. In the case of a book, traditionally, and still frequently in use today, the spine is sewn together with a cotton thread that holds all the pockets together in a calibrated tension. Each pocket is punctured and perforated to allow the thread to loop, weave and knot in patterns on the back of the spine, creating the axis of rotation for the book. Marx borrows this structural technique and transfers it onto the pages themselves. Lines, grids and folds are all recreated with cotton on paper embroidery; the threads carefully tensioned into geometric webs in such a way that belie their soft origins.

Language also relies on woven spines and webs, at once a structuring grammar, but also a field of inter-textual threads, text invoking other texts, speaking through deferred presences, weaving its way from mouth to ear to mouth and book to eye to hand. Like the points of intersections in Marx’s grids, words and phrases are also nodes in a web, and one can follow the circuitous paths and bends to other nodes or words, entire systems woven and held under tension in semiotic grids and fabrics. The meaning and presence of a word always resides elsewhere.

In many instances Marx’s source materials are crumpled and folded, enhancing the texture of the surfaces, and effortlessly tracing transitions from book, to grid, to landscape. Landscapes are already texts. Still to this day, reading and

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12 Stave: Fold 2011

Cotton thread and cotton paper ~ 57 x 67 cm

Photo credit: A. Vlachakis

12 Stave: Crease 2011



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Detail of back

12 Stave: Crease 2011


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Single Fold: Quad & Margin 2011

Cotton thread and cotton paper ~ 33.5 x 57 cm


Single Fold: Irish Margin 2011



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Single Fold: 6 Stave 2011



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Horizontal Saccade 3: Irish Margin 2011


Photo credit: B. Cnoops

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Quad & Margin: Crease 2011



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Irish Margin: Crumple 2 2011



Irish Margin: Crumple 1 2011



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Green Graph: Crease 2011



Gray Graph: Fold 2011



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Detail of back

Green Graph: Crease 2011


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Lose 2011

Oil on Belgian Linen, Rabbit Skin Glue ~ 120 x 100 cm

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Landscape 2011


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Red Stone 2 2011


Red Stone 1 2011


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Heap 2010

Oil on canvas ~ 95 x 126 cm

Photo credit: J. Hodgkiss

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Two Points 2009

Oil on canvas ~ 50 x 50 cm

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Moving Past 2011

Relief print on semi-transparent cotton paper chine collé on Hahnemühle Copperplate 300gsm paper

54 x 78.5 cm ~ Edition 10


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Detail

Moving Past 2011


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Mountain: Horizon 2011

Monotype on Hahnemühle Copperplate 300gsm ~ 54 x 78.5 cm


Mountain: Crease 2011



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Black Stone 2 2011



Black Stone 2011



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Maja Marx is a Johannesburg based artist. Her work has featured in South African and international exhibitions. In 2007 Marx had a debut solo exhibition, As Far As The Eye Can Touch, at The Premises Gallery, Johannesburg in 2007, and in 2010, a second solo exhibition, Crease, at Outlet, Pretoria. She served as curator to a choice of local exhibitions, was selected as Young Curator for Aardklop National Art Festival 2007 and operated as curator for the gordonschachatcollection between 2007 and 2009.

Marx is a fellow of the Ampersand Foundation (New York/Johannesburg) and a participant of MAPS (Master of Art in the Public Sphere); an exchange between the Wits School of the Arts, Johannesburg, South Africa and the École Cantonale d’art du Valais in Sierre, Switzerland. Marx received her Masters Degree in Fine Art with distinction from the University of the Witwatersrand in 2008. Her work is included in a range of public and private collections.

Heap: Earth 2010

31 woven blankets ~ 150 x 200 cm

Photo credit: J. Hodgkiss, Ecotopian States, University of Johannesburg Gallery, curated by Jacki McInnes.

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Gender Exhibition, University Pretoria

Absa Atelier, African Window, Pretoria

1998: Sasol New Signatures, Pretoria

Button Exhibition, Civic Gallery, Johannesburg

1997: Sasol New Signatures, Pretoria

INTERVENTIONS2009: Urban: Optic Garden, Houghton Drive Traffic Island HBY Public Artworks Programme, Johannesburg, in collaboration with 26’10 south Architects.

2008: Urban: Welcome To Our Hillbrow, HBY Public Artworks Programme Phase 1, Hillbrow Gateway, Johannesburg

2007: Landscape: My Fear, Armed response, Goethe Institute, Johannesburg

Urban: Pedestrian Poetry, Cascoland, Drill Hall, Johannesburg

Landscape: Z/Onderwater, Zonderwater Correctional Service, Cullinan

2006: Landscape: I am the world on which I walk, Bois de Finges, Sierre, Switzerland

INVOLVEMENT2010: Film and Animation: REwind Cantata: Philip Miller, Soutbank , London, UK

2008: Film and Animation: REwind Cantata: Philip Miller, Johannesburg

2007–2008: Curator: gordonschachatcollection, Johannesburg

2007: Film and Animation: REwind Cantata: Philip Miller, Brooklyn, New York, Williamstown, Massachussets, USA

Costume and design: Truth in Translation Project: Michael Lessac

Radio talk show presenter: Oogtaal: monthly Visual Culture conversations on Radio Sonder Grense with Johann Botha

2005–2007: Lecturer: Design and Drawing, Design and Production: Wits School of Arts Johannesburg

2006: Costume and design: Truth in Translation Project: Michael Lessac

2003–2005: Head of Department: Visual Culture: The Open Window School of Visual Communication, Pretoria.

2000–2002: Lecturer in Art Theory: The Open Window School of Visual Communication, Pretoria.

2000–2001: Coordinator: Camouflage art.culture.politics, Johannesburg

2000: Research assistant: URBAN FUTURES 2000, at the Museum Africa, Johannesburg: Willem Boshoff &NRF Technicon Pretoria: African Research Centre, Pretoria

FORMAL QUALIFICATIONS2008: University of the Witwatersrand MA (FA) cum laude

1996–1999: Technikon Pretoria (now Tswane University of Technology) BA Tech Fine and Applied Arts cum laude

SOLO EXHIBITIONS2011: Fold, Whatiftheworld / Gallery, Cape Town

2010: Crease, Outlet, Pretoria

2007: As Far As The Eye Can Touch, The Premises Gallery, Johannesburg

SELECTED GROUP EXHIBITIONS2011: Basic Reality, Goodman Gallery Projects at Arts on Main, Johannesburg

ABSA Boekrak, KKNK, Oudshoorn

2010: Glove, Joburg Art Fair collaboration with Artist Proof Studios, Johannesburg

Spier Contemporary, Cape Town City Hall, Cape Town

Absa Ateliers, Absa Towers Johannesburg

Ecotopian States, University of Johannesburg Gallery

2009: Paper Pigeon, Pigeon Square Public Artwork, Johannesburg, in collaboration with Gerhard Marx

Anaphora, Michaelis Rosedale Gallery, Cape Town

The Heart of the African City, African Perspectives 2009, The African City Centre (re)sourced, University of Pretoria

2008: Absa Ateliers , Absa Towers Johannesburg

2007–2008: Away, Richmond, Map Richmond, Northern Cape

2006: Kazoo performance exhibition, The Premises, Johannesburg

ELIA exhibition – Cuenca, Spain & Gent, Belgium

Hollard – Waste at Work

2005: Outlet laboratory, Aardklop, Potchefstroom

‘n Oog vir woorde, Aardklop, Potchefstroom

2004: Brett Kebble Award 2004

Big Cheese, The Openwindow, Pretoria

geslag, Aardklop, Potchefstroom

2003: Woordfees, Stellenbosch

2002: Auto Geographies, Millenium 2, Johannesburg (curator & exhibitor)

2001: Manuscript Exhibition, Boekehuis, Johannesburg

Wordfest Manuscript Exhibition, Grahamstown

Fonk, Pretoria (curator & exhibitor)

2000: Absa Atelier, Absa Towers, Johannesburg

Flush, The Openwindow, Pretoria

Cloth Workers Coalition Exhibition, African Window, Pretoria

Weft and Warp, Civic Gallery, Johannesburg

Sasol New Signatures, Pretoria

(B)Reachings, Urban Futures, Johannesburg: Willem Boshoff

1999: Gallery Vos: Opening Exhibition, Pretoria

Gallery Vos: Miniature Exhibition, Pretoria

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© The Artist and Whatiftheworld 2011

Maja Marx / Fold

WhatiftheWorld Gallery

#1 arGyle street Woodstock

cape toWn south africa 7925

[email protected] www.whatiftheworld.com

Printed in South Africa

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