Exhibition

Robert Marsden and Maria van Kesteren

6 Apr 2016 – 14 May 2016

Event times

Tuesday - Friday 11am - 6pm, Saturday 11am - 4pm

Cost of entry

FREE

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Marsden Woo Gallery

London, United Kingdom

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Travel Information

  • Bus numbers 55, 243, 26 and 35 also stop nearby.
  • Old Street Underground and Shoreditch and Hoxton Overground stations are a short walk away.
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This upcoming joint exhibition leads us on an investigation of space – Robert Marsden’s new monumental structure analysing the architecture of the gallery, and the definitions of interior and exterior space within Maria van Kesteren’s beautifully proportioned bowl and box forms.

About

Always concerned with the spatial relationships of three-dimensional, sculptural form that has been pared back to the essential, Marsden’s larger scale work usually allows physical access, the ability to walk within as well as around the structures. For this show, his latest piece Neither Here Nor There is purposefully a more condensed, almost knot-like construction, deliberately constrained to fit the proportions of the gallery space.

For van Kesteren, ‘specifically the box gives one freedom to express: to create a tension between open and closed, between in and out, between spontaneity and reserve, between openness and disguise’. Surfaces are evenly stained or painted, so that the detail of the grain becomes secondary to their formal properties, focussing instead on the play between mass and emptiness that these hollow circular objects create.

Although most celebrated for her works in wood, MARIA VAN KESTEREN has also designed glass for Royal Leerdam and ceramics for factories including Koninklijke Tichelaar Makkum. In 1982 van Kesteren designed the trophy for the 1983 to 1987 awards of the Françoise van den Bosch Prize. 

Van Kesteren trained with the woodturner Henk van Trierum in Utrecht in the late fifties and is based in Hilversum, Netherlands. In 1991 she received the Culture Prize of the City of Hilversum and the Kho Liang le Prize in 1994. Examples of her work can be found in several major public collections including; the Victoria and Albert Museum (London), Centraal Museum (Utrecht), Museum Boijmans van Beuningen (Rotterdam) and Stedelijk Museum (Amsterdam). A major retrospective exhibition of her work was held at the Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam in 1995. 

ROBERT MARSDEN is best known for his extraordinary and uncompromising minimalist metal sculpture. His work has been characterised by the critic Mel Gooding as ‘belonging to that specifically modernist type of the sculptural architectonic’. He works on a variety of scales from tabletop sculptures to monumental outdoor pieces. 

Marsden studied at High Wycombe College of Technology and Art and the Royal College of Art. He has exhibited internationally and his work can be found in the Crafts Council Collection, London; Birmingham Museum & City Art Gallery; Shipley Art Gallery; Sheffield Assay Office and the National Gallery of Australia. 

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