Magali Reus : On Like Scenery

Occupying the entire Museum Dhondt-Dhaenens (MDD), Magali Reus’ first institutional solo exhibition in Belgium, On Like Scenery, brings together new photographic and sculptural works alongside works from MDD’s collection.
Two new photographic and sculptural series have been brought together with paintings – selected and staged by the artist – by Léon De Smet, James Ensor and Louis Thévenet from MDD's collection.

Reus began one of the new series, Landings, last summer by photographing fruit and sliced cabbage within a mise-en-scène of construction debris. Climbing into waste containers in her hometown of the Hague in the Netherlands, Reus positioned the produce so that they appear to pose – sometimes exuberantly, other times shyly – among heaped rubble, plaster dust, exhausted paint cans, and splintered floorboards. Twisting the tradition of Low Countries’ still life, Reus meditates on the incongruities of our relation to nature, artifice and ephemeral life.

Reus’ new sculptural series Candlesticks consist of towering street lamps in earthy greens with open and oversized incandescent light bulbs. The curlicues of bent metal steel suggestive of the electrified bulb filaments form instead cursive English words, each spelling out different types of electrical illumination as ‘halogen’, ‘fluorescent’, and ‘LED’. Considerations of solar energy, supply chains and metabolic systems animate these powder coated sculptures.

Responding directly to the museum’s pastoral setting, On Like Scenery reflects the artist’s ongoing interest in transformation and how different spaces, symbols and objects determine specific situations.

On Like Scenery is generously supported by Mondriaan Fonds; the Ambassy of the Kingdom of the Netherlands in Belgium; The Approach, London; François Ghebaly, Los Angeles. In collaboration with the Centre d’art contemporain - la synagogue de Delme.