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.

Read: This Wild Song interview with Marise Maas

Maas strips back the use-value of things and considers their affective, aesthetic and emotional potency. Her paintings excavate the beauty in the banal, harnessing small moments as stages for larger – albeit ambiguous – stories. The micro and macro coalesce into new narratives that strip away material hierarchies and open up a space for the somewhat paradoxical experience of subjective objecthood.
Exerpt from catalogue Essay by Elli Walsh, 2019

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, BHP Billiton, Swinburne University of Technology and National Australia Bank Collection. She lives and works in Melbourne.