For HOLDERS, their first solo presentation at Saskia Neuman Gallery, Susanna Marcus Jablonski has taken the body of a central sculpture, Weeping Lion (2023), and extended it into an all-encompassing installation of newly created glass and ceramic works. Marcus Jablonski is a Stockholm-based artist whose sculptures, moving image works, and spatial installations skillfully combine fragile materials with found objects in an exquisite balancing act of near-abstraction.

In dialogue with Anders Årfelt, creator of the iconic Stockholm Lion, Marcus Jablonski has cast an identical version of this classic public sculpture, except that it appears to be miraculously crying. The mechanism that creates these tears – pump, water tubes, industrial battery, cables, and canisters – stretches out from the lion’s interior into the room’s architecture, held in place by a number of handmade ceramic carriers.

HOLDERS presents the deconstruction of a readymade symbol, and proposes that the symbolic figure can instead serve as a portrait of our interconnectedness to, or dissimulation of, the systems that support us.

Centering the final room of the exhibition is a large glass sculpture, which hangs from the ceiling. Gracefully hovering in the space, it at once alludes to stained glass church windows or the wrought iron gates of stately homes or corrective institutions, while its midnight blue color and ornamentation speak of ancient alphabets, suggesting a suspension of the binaries between inside and outside, before and after, fragility and strength.

ARTWORK

❮

❯

×