Marco Maggi: SUPRA muro

Known for his virtuoso drawings, Marco Maggi presents a new body of surprising and beguiling sculpture for his eighth exhibition at Hosfelt Gallery.  SUPRA muro consists primarily of works made of the tiniest hand-cut paper shapes that cluster, fold, curl, stack and bend, encrusting all sorts of surfaces, including the very walls of the gallery.

For twenty years, Maggi has considered – then elegantly answered – the question of how to take drawing from two into three dimensions.  He has drawn in relief on aluminum foil, carved everyday objects like rulers or apples with his abstracted lexicon, and inscribed plexiglass to create drawings that are only visible when they cast a shadow.

The forms suggest meaning – alphabets of unknown languages, computer circuitry, Google Earth imaging of vaguely familiar cities – but no matter how much you puzzle over them, the shapes are inexplicable.

Viewers are compelled to move close, slow down, stand on tiptoe, look obliquely, even crawl around on the ground in an effort to make sense of these encryptions.  And in so doing, they physically act out Maggi’s metaphor for understanding:  you must change perspective – see things from another point-of-view – in order to find meaning.

While Maggi’s visual vocabulary evades certitude, his titles — referring to technology, geopolitics and cultural history — offer clues to his messages.  A philosopher-poet of non-representational drawing, Maggi says of his work, “Focus is not the object or the subject, but the time between the object and the viewer.  I am interested in the pace of the viewing process.”

Born in Montevideo, Uruguay in 1957, Marco Maggi now divides his time between New Paltz, NY and Montevideo. He was chosen to represent Uruguay in the 2015 Venice Biennale. His work is in numerous museum collections including the Museum of Modern Art, New York; Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles; Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; Art Institute of Chicago; Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington DC; Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco; Museo de Arte Contemporaneo, São Paulo; Walker Art Center, Minneapolis; as well as in the Cisneros Collection, New York and the Daros Foundation, Zurich. He has been represented by Hosfelt Gallery since 1999.