Marvelli Gallery is pleased to present Minima Moralia, a group exhibition of works by:

Samuel Beckett Matias Faldbakken Glenn Ligon Bruce Nauman

The title comes from a book by Theodor W. Adorno.

The exhibition examines four artists who share an ethical approach to art as well as a conceptual practice informed by the use of text. They belong to different generations, have different visual strategies and intellectual interests. They share, however, a sobriety in their approach to art-making, and a belief in art as an intellectual inquiry with an ethical value – no matter how oblique and elusive.

Words are very important to the artists in the exhibition. They are becoming more and more relevant in the practice of many contemporary artists as well. The exhibition focuses on this specific aspect.

The starting point for the show was a video of the staging of Samuel Beckett’s play “Not I” from 1973. In the play, an illuminated mouth, set high in the darkness of the stage, spews out words at a strikingly fast pace, telling the story of a woman’s silent life. (Interestingly enough, Beckett was inspired to create this work after seeing Caravaggio’s painting, the Beheading of St. John the Baptist, in Malta).

Matias Faldbakken will present a series of new works that continue his investigation of language through a process of suppression of letters and sentences in order to create visual abstractions. Besides being a visual artist – he represented Norway at the 2005 Venice Biennale – Matias Faldbakken has already published three novels, as part of his Scandinavian Misanthropy Trilogy.

Words are also prevalent in much of Glenn Ligon’s work (paintings, works on paper and neon pieces are exhibited) as a result of his long and intimate engagement with literature. Works in the exhibition draw their text from Ralph Ellison, James Baldwin, and Gertrude Stein.

In the video, drawings, and prints that are exhibited in the gallery, Bruce Nauman investigates “the point where language starts to break down as a useful tool for communication”, which is the “edge where poetry and art occurs”.