Marie Matusz Challenges Institutional Presentations of Time

Cultural institutions often function like reservoirs: repositories in which artefacts are collected before being released to the public in a more easily digestible form. Whether historical or contemporary, natural or man-made, museum objects are invariably presented at a remove from everyday life. Marie Matusz’s solo exhibition at Kunsthalle Basel, ‘Reservoir’, deconstructs this artificial division in an installation that spans painting and sculpture, sound works and print.    

A continuation of Matusz’s long-term engagement with vitrines, three display cabinets stand on a newly installed zinc panel floor in the centre of the first room. Exactingly placed and obliquely lit to cast architectural shadows, these dark wooden forms subdivide the Kunsthalle’s open-plan hall into four eerie zones. Unlike their more typical museal counterparts, these vitrines have their glass fronts slid open, thereby eliminating any separation between artefact and audience. Rather, as each pane reflects low glimmers of light, which dance in my periphery, I find myself drawn further into both the artworks contained within and the exhibition space itself.

Each of Matusz’s vitrines houses two large paintings from her series ‘Towards Vanishing’ (all works 2025). These mixed media works on board are subtitled almost elegiacally – Towards Vanishing: Making Ends Meet, for instance, or Towards Vanishing: Under the Canopée (At the Corner of the Sidewalk) – as if mourning some quotidian experience or chance inspiration. Their surfaces, meanwhile, recall a sodden riverbed or a rusted sheet of steel, hinting at the formative components of a reservoir, whether natural or man-made. Paired with the site-specific sound piece Reservoir – a percussive collaboration between Matusz and Franco Caggese that interweaves ambient sounds recorded in and around the Kunsthalle with mechanical noises and recordings from the artist’s previous works – the installation counterposes the orderliness commonly found in institutional displays, instead inviting reflections of a more personal nature by promoting the sediment of life as something wonderfully murky.

In the adjoining annex hangs Matusz’s monumental wall-based work Two Visions of Unity (and even in unity, two lovers oppose one, be it against the world or the world against them): a black-painted wooden circle peering out from the centre of a large, two-panel mirror. Reflecting all that lies around it, Two Visions of Unity compliments Matusz’s subjective vision for the show by creating a dizzying effect that confounds any clear sense of separation between viewer and artwork.

Installed as a UV print on the Kunsthalle’s window in the final room, Fellow Prisoners is a photographic reproduction, in shades of stony blue, of a statue depicting one of the Sibyls of Ancient Greece. Legendarily reputed to have prophetic abilities, the Sibyls have become an allegorical trope often deployed to symbolize worldly knowledge. I am pulled into the dark hole at the centre of the image – an incidental void created by the interplay of sunlight and shadow on the window to which the print has been applied. In turn, I notice how chance intrusions, such as the branches of trees on the street outside, create the illusion that the Kunsthalle’s window has been smashed. It is as though Matusz wishes the quotidian knowledge often held outside of museal presentations to leak into our encounter.

Standing before Fellow Prisoners, with the intense aural experience of Reservoir reverberating behind me, I think back to my near-spectral encounter with Matusz’s painting-filled vitrines. Carefully composed and thoughtfully installed, the artworks in this show have been designed to reflect one another, forming ground for contemplation. By challenging the modes of display usually adopted by cultural institutions, ‘Reservoir’ urges its audience to seek a more personal engagement with repositories of time.

Marie Matusz, ‘Reservoir’ is on view at Kunsthalle Basel, Switzerland, until 27 April

_{Main image: Marie Matusz, Towards Vanishing: Hommage-Letter, Image-Density (detail), 2025, natural pigment, varnish, lacquer, graphite and oil paint on phenolic plywood, MDF, PMMA, mahogany, each 260 × 260 × 25 cm. Courtesy: Kunsthalle Basel; photograph: Philipp Hänger}