STUDIO MARKUS HAALA

“Many of Markus Haala’s installations contain potent images that stick with the viewer—Delft tiled tables that reference the Anthropocene, piles of coal in the gallery, cast pavement displayed as relief sculpture, pods containing an ecosystem of weeds, an altar of potatoes glowing in purple-pink neon light. This pink light recurs in his work—a reference to the pink-illuminated greenhouses of his homeland. Yet the work that grips my memory the most is Haala’s Silent Sunrise [After H.M.]. It is a two-way mirror mounted on the wall with a bright orange electrical cord hanging from it and gathering in a tangled pile on the floor. Inside a bright orange neon tube in the shape of an arc lights up when it senses motion or heat. The arc form, as Haala’s title suggests, evokes Hans Memling’s fifteenth-century altarpiece The Last Judgment. In Memling’s painting, Christ sits upon a shining sphere while humanity is judged and sorted. In Haala’s work this arc is enticing and mesmerizing. It is a religious icon for the new epoch. Does it signal the fiery end of days or simply the dawn of a new era? As with many of his works, Haala leaves us in an ambiguous and uncertain place. This silent sunrise is open to interpretation. It is both magnificent and menacing, promising and foreboding.”

“Haala’s own works unsettlingly mingle the natural and the synthetic ... “Synthetic Landscape #1 (Carbon Footprint)” ... is a truly contemporary landscape, an environment more familiar to many than forests. Water will cycle through Haala’s “Habitat Pod,” a terrarium of weeds inside a Fiberglas shell, until it runs out, and the plants will die ... Even our well-intentioned interventions, this piece suggests, might be Frankensteinian blunders.”

“Alex MacLean’s aerial photographs of mining and farming ... strike a harmony with Markus Haala’s rust-covered sculpture “Halde,” a Richard Serra-style behemoth of steel plates propped against one another, which references mining operations near the artist’s childhood home in Germany. Together, they reflect on humanity’s habit of wrenching what it needs from the earth.”