FRANKFURT.- Maria Loboda’s sculptures and installations are mysterious and full of secrets; their encoded messages reveal themselves only at second glance. The artist uses her three-dimensional works to transfer past knowledge into the here and now. From November 16, 2018, to February 3, 2019, the Schirn Kunsthalle Frankfurt is presenting the exhibition Maria Loboda. Idyl In An Electronics Factory including three works by Maria Loboda which she has developed specially for the freely accessible Rotunda. Taken together they tell a story that refers to the pioneering American landscape architect James C. Rose (1913–1991).

The central installation in the exterior space of the Rotunda bears the title Tout terriblement: it consists of two parallel hedges of Portuguese laurel that rise up to the first floor of the Rotunda, blocking the way through and transforming the space into a labyrinth. There are four, seemingly organic concrete sculptures inside and between the hedges that create the abstracted form of the letter “R.” The hedges are in tubs, also made of concrete, which the artist has adorned in various places with incised letters. Together they render the expression Tout te**iblement, made popular by the fashion designer Yves Saint Laurent (1936–2008), in turn citing a calligram by the French poet Guillaume Apollinaire (1880–1918).

With the exhibition title Idyl In An Electronics Factory, Loboda makes direct reference to a review with the same title published in 1963 in the American design magazine Interiors. It addresses the interior courtyard of a company for electronic components in Livingstone, New Jersey, designed by James C. Rose. He saw the movement and transformation of the landscape as essential features of landscape architecture. Rose included the relationships between all of the materials that occur in landscape architecture—such as, for example, the constantly changing plants as well as the static sculptures, but also the people who linger in and move through the designed landscape.

There is large-format canvas in the Rotunda gallery on the first floor on which Maria Loboda has reproduced the cover of that issue of the magazine Interiors. The painting Grand Interiors features a colored sketch of a bistro table with two chairs in front of a spiral staircase. Its dimensions cause the picture to look strangely hemmed in and noticeably out of proportion in the passageway, as if it has become jammed there. The Rotunda gallery also displays the lettering Note the lizard on the circuit on the wall, which challenges visitors to set out in search of a stuffed gecko that has also been placed in the Rotunda.

Matthias Ulrich, the curator of the exhibition, on the artist: “Using simple aesthetics and an economy of means, Maria Loboda heightens the poetic effect of her sculptures and spatial installations. At the Schirn Kunsthalle Frankfurt she is quite literally presenting a sculpture garden, a sculpture and a garden in one, a labyrinth in a very small space. She leads visitors along a path consisting of individual stations, and these in turn reveal separate stories. In doing so the artist works with plain objects and things that first develop their mysterious effect when they are deprived of their familiar form and lent new shape.”

Maria Loboda (*1979 in Cracow) lives and works in Berlin. She studied from 2003 to 2008 with Mark Leckey at the Städelschule in Frankfurt am Main. Her works have already been shown in solo and group exhibitions worldwide, for example at the Kunsthalle Basel, the IAC—Institut d’art contemporain in Villeurbanne, The Power Plant in Toronto, the Kunstverein Braunschweig, the Kunstverein Bielefeld, and the Museo Reina Sofía in Madrid. Loboda also participated in the documenta 13 in 2012.