Project Room: Marco Maggi | No Idea

January 12 – April 29, 2012

Curated by Selene Preciado

Reflecting his interest in architecture, anthropology, mapping, and language, Marco Maggi is best known for his use of everyday and industrial materials such as Plexiglas, acrylic, aluminum foil, paper and cardboard, on which he inscribes a vocabulary that evokes concepts that range from pre-Columbian cultures to early twentieth-century Russian Constructivism. As the artist states, his “drawings resemble writing in a language [we] cannot read,” referring to the modern concept that a drawing reflects thought process.

Maggi’s Project Room will consist of various works including architectural plans of great architects such as Frank Lloyd Wright and Ludwig Mies van der Rohe in acrylic boxes, with titles referencing the media mogul and founder of CNN Robert Edward “Ted” Turner—the cuts on the plans as a pun on “media cuts” and “breaking news,” and the term “turner” used as a synonym of turning and covering. A floor piece comprised of a grid of reams of a total of 128,000 sheets of paper, topped with yellow pieces of paper with cuts and creases will be the central installation of the Project Room. This grid of paper reams will be a sort of city that rises from the floor, defying the two-dimensionality of architectural plans, creating a place with different rules about the notion time and scale.

Marco Maggi’s Project Room will include sculptural installations reflecting his interest in mapping, anthropology, and language, such as in his recent sculpture HOTBED (ORANGE), 2009, in which he covered the floor of The Warehouse Gallery in New York, with reams of paper and created tiny paper sculptures on them with a razorblade, as a revision of Henri Matisse’s paper cut-outs.

Exhibition view: Project Room Marco Maggi: No idea. MoLAA, 2012.

Photo: Jon Endow