CROY NIELSEN

For the exhibition Das Budget, Marlie Mul has produced wall-mounted relief sculptures made using silicone sheets that are cut, folded, and rolled into forms. The wriggly, exoskeletal material is held in place by customized metal rods, and the monochromatic colors are the result of pigments mixed into the liquid polymers. Mul’s interlocking pieces look relatively familiar, like alienated fingers or clay roof tiles, and the translucent colors in the patterns suggest fleshy skin tones. Constructed in varying scales, their soft edged repetition and optical patterns offer minimalist precision, and all of the tenets of geometric abstraction are there. Mul’s sculptural nomenclature has an economy of style that emits a latent wit in intelligently dumbed-down, aberrant forms. Her sculptural lingua franca always seems to circle back to the human, or human-like bodies, with all their attendant physiology, weight, and measure. Silicone, that most efficient utilitarian material, has sent rockets to space and back, sealed the windows of homes everywhere, and, is the go-to material of choice for a space-age 2.0 future that encompasses all things AI and the multi-colored ping of digital media. Mul parlays such altered material into arresting handmade multiplications of elaborate structures. They may initially look machined, as in Fordist mass production, but they’re not. It’s the opposite, in fact. One sheet gets poured into a pan-like box, modified with precisely bracketed armature to hold the solidified liquid into place; then the square or rectangle is unpeeled. Slits and holes appear, then disappear, overlapping into the finished form. The individual work titles suggest even more. By calling them “ Large Charm (Capsule)”, “ Large Charm (Pellet)”, or simply “ Pouch,” they suggest a necklace or bracelet wrapped on a figure, or of a container, which in essence is both vessel and void. In mastering plastic control of this most temperamental of materials, Mul has developed a strict methodology that is able to recreate similar geometries ad infinitum. Hence the new series mutates like alternating currents in an auto-suggestive sculptural language of recognizable characteristics.