Kne­a­der

Maya Bringolf studied at the Academy of Fine Arts in Munich from 1994 to 2000 and graduated with a diploma in 2001. She then spent 6 years in Basel and has lived and worked in Zurich for 13 years.

Her artistic media are sculpture, installation and collage. She has been able to show her works in numerous solo and group exhibitions at home and abroad. In 2008 and 2009 she was awarded the Federal Prize for Art, and in 2015 she received a grant from the Canton of Schaffhausen. Work contributions and foreign scholarships from the canton and the city of Zurich are also part of her CV. Her works have been purchased by various collections and museums. In her practice, Maya Bringolf is interested in cycles and systems in the broadest sense. In various transformation processes such as melting, perforating and cutting, but also addition and combination, she examines objects in the context of their spaces and social functions. In doing so, she exposes precarious situations, tensions and interactions between people, objects and space. The ruinous is just as much a metaphor for a late capitalist world of work as it is for the damaged bodies that move in these worlds.

We are all familiar with Kneader monoblock chairs from public spaces or garden pubs. It is a global product, either frowned upon as ugly or glorified as a design icon, the chair is hated or loved by us. In southern countries, the chairs are more of a symbol of Western production and consumption. The artist is interested in this ambivalence and the fact that it is a cheap plastic product that circulates all over the world and is quickly thrown away.

The sculptures consist of these white, melted monobloc chairs, supplemented with  gravel, sand, steel and paint granules. In a slow melting process in a ceramic kiln, the chairs collapse due to the heat. The sticky mass is kneaded together with the other materials (hence the title “Kneader”, which means “kneader”). Finally, steel pipes are drilled into them or the mass is wrapped around the pipes. Immediately afterwards, the whole thing solidifies in cold water. The colorful, marbled surfaces with the gravel are created when the solidified mass is cut open with a circular saw. They seem very seductive and have an aesthetic, whereas the rest of the surface appears crude, cracked and indefinable. They are bodies that are reminiscent of jacked-up mushrooms and have formed by chance.

In the art box I combine them with black painted “strums” made of fishnet stockings and polyurethane foam. Like charred wood, these stand all over the room and form a framework in which the sculptures are integrated. The installation is reminiscent of a musty, rotten landscape in a terrarium, populated by a strange species. These growths appear strange, standing on hard steel pipes. Are they crutches or legs? They could be connected underground. This landscape forms a sharp contrast to the urban, built environment in Winterthur. There seems to be a completely different climate in the art box, warm and humid, tropical. Whatever grows here can't get out and nothing can get in from outside.

mayabringolf.ch