SINE QUA NON
As banal as it is fundamental: breathing is living.
Having a space in which to engage in this essential activity is the conscious or unconscious goal of every living being.
Breathing is therefore foremost keeping oneself alive. From this imponderable fact, the desire arises to breathe more fully, to breathe deeper. A liberated existence then begins to take shape, together with its prospects for fulfilment. Vertiginous questions therefore emerge:
How to inhabit the world? How to inhabit it together?

Breathing Space is a project enabling six artists to express the joy of breathing, sighing, exhaling and respiring, to the point of sometimes exceeding spatial limits in their interpretations. As part of its second participation at the Luxembourg Art Week, the Galerie Maria Lund will be presenting a dialogue between the universes of Peter Martensen, Nicolai Howalt, Bente Skjøttgaard, Min Jung Yeon, Marlon Wobst and Yoon Ji-Eun.

Presentation of the artists:

In dreamlike scenes where humour and melancholy are inextricably linked, PETER MARTENSEN depicts his experts in white coats or in suits, their neutral faces closed to the viewer’s gaze. The painter accompanies us on an absurd perambulation, between laboratory scenes and green forests whose temporality and spatiality can be called into question. He thereby symbolically gives shape to our underlying uncertainties and anxieties, full of nuance and subtlety.

BENTE SKJØTTGAARD has been exploring the depths of the underwater world for the last few years as an insatiable observer of the fascinating wildlife that inhabits it. It is home to very primitive, mono-cellular creatures, not far removed from the beings who first drew breath on our planet. The artist’s sculptures restore these creatures in all the grace of their movements and extraordinary appearances. Giving them visibility, lifting them out of the depths, allows the artist to draw attention to this wondrous universe, which has nevertheless been disrupted by human invasion.

NICOLAI HOWALT, a photographer and visual artist, places invisibility at the heart of his work. Following a strictly scientific approach, he captures, observes and records his subjects (the healing rays of the sun, the anomalies of the botanical world, the perception of pain, the beauty and abstraction of microscopics and macroscopics, etc.). By choosing a very particular materiality (vintage photo paper, metal plates or glass), he seeks to reveal their profound natures. His recent series about Mars shows scalpel-carved fragments of these distant landscapes, objects of contemporary colonial ambitions, which are subject to exploration and projection. They bear a striking resemblance to landscapes on Earth. This work is characterised by a specific poetry and an original aesthetics.

MIN JUNG-YEON has been an observer of nature from a very young age, nurturing a passion for both science and philosophy. Her universe is inspired by research in quantum physics, as well as by Lao-Tzu’s reflections on the creative power produced by the dichotomy between energy and emptiness. A question runs through her work like a leitmotif: how to welcome the upheavals of existence and to fit into the permanent movement of life?

MARLON WOBST’s work is nothing other than Life: enjoyment, poetry, play, tenderness, humour. The scenes he imagines are often drawn from urban and contemporary settings. Yet his works always go beyond this temporality. The artist sculpts (ceramics), models (felted wool) and paints his characters like a Pygmalion of matter, allowing his joyful figures to flourish on the space of the canvas – in a state that is both primitive and permanent, characteristic of living beings.

In her recent work, YOON JI-EUN explores the space of mental breathing: an intimate place where the mind seeks and finds the means to expand. The graphic forms skim fluid and organic planes. The figurative elements are fragmented, navigating the landscape. The artist grasps and tries to transcribe some of the circuits of her thoughts that grapple in the superimposed temporalities. On paper and engraved wood, she explores two- and three-dimensionality, drawing, painting, sculpting, marking and searching for a whole that would make the complexity of such a field palpable.