Art Rotterdam 2024: Maria Pask & Tincuta Marin

Maria Pask is a Welsh artist who lives and works in Amsterdam. Her art primarily focuses on processes and includes people from a wide variety of societal groups. Based on artistic strategies developed for the most part during the 1960s, the artist’s works are reminiscent of the radical nature of the alternative movement. Her installation works interpret the nature of collective creativity, empowerment, and the live moment. Working with open formats and social structures, her works have been described as a ‘cocktail of social commentary, political doctrine, ecological soundings, philosophy, feminism, body politics, and religion.’ 

Living and working in Cluj-Napoca, Tincuta Marin (1995, Galatia, Romania) is an intriguing painter and sculptor with a spell-binding ability for fantastical and transhistorical storytelling. Driven by an abundant imagination, Marin synthesises different characters and stylistic references from Romanian folklore and ancient civilisations. She does so not in an expressively allegorical way, but rather in an inventive melange of elements and personages she finds fascinating, composed into scenes with a mystical allure.

This presentation will precede her solo exhibition at the gallery, titled Purring Figure, opening on February 10th until March 16th. 

In both her paintings and her sculptures, Marin’s characters are often laid out in a still-life manner, dwelling in vague but enigmatic spaces. Though their appearance is somewhat anthropomorphic, they strike as architectural elements, pieces of furniture, or even charms containing a kind of magic that can be puzzled out by means of an esoteric knowledge. Marin is a syncretic storyteller that ropes us into her oneiric world to take on a nonlinear journey through imagination, craft, folklore, and art history.