MARTIN MAELLER. saturnine

About

Maeller creates forms that, although clear in their appearance, throw you due to their material and surface. An industrial material like the metal lead is bent into a large ring, carbon fibers are woven into a net, and rubber shrinking tubes resemble drooping branches - slackened and unstable. Sole prints of Nike Vapormax sneakers merge with primeval fossils, the trilobites, which feil victim to mass extinction 300 million years ago. A lamentation „ Please stay a while to share my grief" is forced into the corner of the room and asks for sympathy. 

This critical stance is already given by the exhibition title Saturnine, which is a synonym for „sombre". In the Middle Ages alchemists and mystics claimed that the planet Saturn had an influence on human physiology, especially on the temperament of the melancholic. Today, recent researches from the Cassini Huygens orbiter show that the planet will lose its iconic rings within the next 100 million years. 

The sculptures approach materiality and meaning post-event, as if viewed after an ending. They seem shallow, used, lost - like buried ruins of a time that is not available anymore. As fragments and expressions of a melan­cholic world, they are empty, eerie and do not incite immediate communication. They function as a resigned comment on the exhausted self in today's society. 

Thus, the work gives an insight into a world that is characterized by transience, fear and the uncertainty of humankind for its place in the universe. lt creates an atmosphere of loss and pessimism in which the viewer has to take up their own position. At the same time, Maeller's work attempts to open up possibilities for turning this discourse of anxiety, insecurity and disunity into something productive and personal. This is how the work of Maeller does not only embody the conflict with the complex self, but also makes it tangible.