CONTEMPORARY ART STOCKROOM Marise Maas

The act of painting dominates the world of Marise Maas. As she pursues her need to capture beauty within the everyday, painting has for her become a form of daily meditation, helping to douse feelings of worry or concern through the act of paying attention to the ordinary things she encounters through the course of a day.

The appeal of Maas’ work lies in this admission that life, for the most part, happens within the rather uneventful ordinariness of daily routines and interactions; the bath is run, the phone is answered, the light bulb is changed. It is while surrounded by these small things that the greater highs and lows of life unfold. Maas states, ‘’I’ve always been interested in glorifying the banal. If you look closely at the smaller detail, you’ll find huge stories’’.

Maas has been fascinated with horses and horse riding since childhood and the repeated depiction of horses within her works represents a form of symbolic stand-in for the often humorous, often tender, qualities of human desire and longing. While emotive connotations certainly exist in her work, Maas also pays attention to the formal concerns of art making, takes her cues from abstract art – embracing textured flat two-dimensional space, colour systems and the compositional power of line.

For Marise Maas, painting is a meditative process that calls upon her experiences of everyday life. Through her paintings, these personal meditations become fantastical mediations of human existence. The subject matter of her work seems woven into a magical ‘other world’ with her idiosyncratic substitution of humans for horses and use of an open, minimalist picture plane, upon which her equine characters float, unanchored by anything more than bold blocks of colour that gesture to a room or a perhaps a stage. They sit anachronistically alongside domestic objects and energetic gestural marks. In Maas’ other worlds, fairytales come to mind.
Excerpt from catalogue essay by Laura Kirkham, 2024

ARTIST PROFILE:
Born in the Netherlands, Marise Maas immigrated to Australia with her family in 1982. Maas’ work is represented in numerous major collections nationally and internationally, including the National Gallery of Australia, Artbank, Swinburne University of Technology and National Australia Bank Collection. She lives and works in Melbourne.