DMW Gallery booth presents a duo show by Marius Ritiu and Emilie Terlinden for the second edition of Art Antwerp.

Marius Ritiu (°1984, Transylvania) is a sculptor, painter and storyteller whose practice questions the concepts of nationhood, borders and nationalism. The fiction, non-fiction and science-fiction of objects that come crashing in from a sky that might not just be, let alone have, a ceiling, is what provides the copper-centric sculptures from Marius Ritiu’s ongoing Sisyphus series with its proper myth. ‘Somewhere under the sky (Sisyphus Part VIII)’ is the latest and eighth installment of these stone from space look-alikes. It can be viewed in the garden of Antwerp’s cathedral as part of the Finis Terrae project until late February 2023. Preliminary studies of the work, inspired by the interstellar rock Oumuamua, are on display at Art Antwerp alongside new works the artist has been developing in Paris.

The mystifying paintings of Emilie Terlinden (°1983, Belgium) emerge through a careful selection of images from the Renaissance and objects from her everyday environment. Though the images remain recognizable to the viewer as references to a specific era, a series of careful manipulations makes them entirely the artist’s own. Before being given their fixed place on the canvas, the images are transformed through folding, alienating them from their original form. These interventions strip the subjects of their familiar historical context and promote them to be protagonists in a new, sophisticated staged spectacle.

Terlinden’s controlled painting technique completes the abstraction. The artist’s working method combines a wide variety of technical actions that make time itself an important factor in her process. The time that elapses between the different steps in the artistic process enhances the final effect of Terlinden’s works, in which the used images literally lose their time.