Maria Tackmann

Rambling, feeling, collecting, assembling, installing. Maria Tackmann’s works are made up of gestures, actions and objects that she picks up along the way, with a predilection for urban spaces, waste ground, neglected areas and niches.

A process of modern-day archeology, attentive to familiar environments, where our gaze does not deign to linger: an archeology that is unfurled in the exhibition space or in the form of unique books constituted of drawings, occasionally photographs, collected papers and found flat materials. "I move them around and around until I decide on a spot for them, like a book." From one shape to another, fragments of brick, wood or concrete, tape, wool, shards of glass... Small objects that the artist sorts, heaps or spreads according to form, matter, size or secret inclination.

And so each exhibition becomes an opportunity for experimentation determined by the encounter with the space, the geography, and the harvest that results. "In Paris, I wandered around picking up things in the neighborhood. In Crete, I worked in an unfinished building, a construction waste dump and an abandoned soccer field. In Athens, I divided a map into thirty-eight sections, walked to the spots where they overlapped and jotted down what I saw. In Tunisia, I counted trees. In Cairo, I filmed my walks and bike rides around the city, watched the videos in the evening and took screenshots. I also cleaned a roof and drew in the dust." Open-ended practice in perpetual motion, whose latest opus will be unveiled in Toulouse.

With the support of Fondation d’entreprise espace écureuil pour l’art contemporain