Marie Anine Møller, Pop, 2021 rubber, glazed ceramic. Courtesy of Federico Savini.
By ISSAC SCOTT, January 2022
Sometimes Marie Anine Møller gets her material from the seafood aisle. Her go-to is the Food Bazaar on Broadway in Brooklyn, a cavernous space stacked high with Goya cans and piles of chops, cow tongues, and fish parts.
Drawing from still life—nature morte—her work exists in photographs and sculpture as evocative reflections on society, the environment, and power.
In one piece, a trout emerges hauntingly vertical from a block of clear ice. It took weeks to perfect the technique of freezing the water into a clear, irrational encasement. It is living, it is sustenance. It is material, it is a being. It is frozen, it is melting.
Here she borrows from the ephemera of our days, transformed into objects of uncanny power; a terrain of the beautiful and unfamiliar.
As a Danish sculptor who’s studied at The Glasgow School of Art and New York’s Pratt Institute, there’s a strain of academic seriousness, illuminated with fervent eccentricity.
Her group show “Preternatural Impacts” last year with Copenhagen’s esteemed Arden Asbæk Gallery featured sculpted fish heads exalted on tripods. The living becomes fixed, unrecognizable.
Through these juxtapositions her work explores contradiction and the nature of value and truth: who defines them, how we recognize, negotiate, manipulate them.
Now based in New York City, Møller was recently named Managing Director at Kunstraum, an artist hub in downtown Brooklyn, where she oversees artist studios, artists-in-residence and a gallery space. We spoke over Zoom, ahead of her forthcoming 2022 show at Lower East Side gallery and nightlife venue Beverly’s.
Link to the Interview in White Hot Magazine