HAMMER | MARLIE MUL

Marlie Mul’s aesthetics (Netherlands, 1980) significantly characterize her work, mostly composed of installations and sculptures. The central themes around which the artist’s research develops are the assertion of human identity and the position of the individual within society. One of Mul’s main interests is the study of the evolution of human intelligence – or, as the artist prefers to define it, stupidity – often represented with an ironic style.

Hammer (2016) is an installation composed by two hammers, coherently with its title, made entirely of flexible silicone, one with the handle colored in a brightly red, and the other in a fascinating aqua green. A peculiar characteristic of this artwork, aside from the vibrant colors, is the size of the two objects, which is much larger than that of a normal hammer.

The aqua green hammer is lying on the ground, in the center of the room. Instead, the red one has been placed vertically against the wall. However, due to the flexibility of the material used, this sculpture cannot stand straight and upright; the handle sags, taking on a strange and bizarre angle that renders the figure of the hammer ridiculously crooked, yet also sad and melancholic. Mul’s hammers have completely lost their functionality and are thus abandoned in a corner of the room.

Silicone is a soft, flexible material, the opposite of what is generally associated with a hammer as a tool: hard, rigid, strong. The resulting contrast is both intriguing and unsettling; one wonders whether the artist’s intent is critical or subversive.
Mul has taken an everyday object and shaped it to her liking with the precise aim of making it dysfunctional and thus eliciting a bewildered reaction from the viewer.
At first glance, Mul’s artworks, including Hammer, may seem cryptic and disconnected from each other, but they are actually realized with a coherence of language recognizable throughout her artistic production.

Marlie Mul
Hammer, 2016
Flexible silicone, 14 × 115 × 49 cm
© Marlie Mul. Courtesy the artist and Croy Nielsen, Vienna. Photo by Georg Petermichl.

Marlie Mul, Iza Tarasewicz, installation view Croy Nielsen, Vienna, 2017. Photo by Georg Petermichl. Courtesy the artists and Croy Nielsen, Vienna.

13/04/24