Biography
Marion Verboom’s sculptures bring together a syntax of minimalism with methods of hybridization and a culture of sampling. Inspired by architecture, urbanism, mythology, ancestral crafts as much as forms of logosyllabic writing, Verboom’s sculptures and installations operate through iteration, by stacking contiguous or disjointed fragments in modular combinations that are adaptive and context-specific.
Since 2015, Verboom has been creating a series of totemic sculptures titled “Achronies”, in reference to their timeless inscription. With these baroque assemblages Verboom subverts the traditional architectural column with patterns and motifs ranging from Classical Greek to pre-Columbian, ancient Anatolian to modernist European repertoires, intertwined with more biographical and organic elements. Using a diverse range of raw materials such as concrete, wood, plaster, bronze, clay, aluminum, and acrylic resin, her sculptures unfold in a wide color spectrum. The artist’s strategic use of moulding and casting techniques add to the animate quality of her sculptures’ surfaces, sometimes integrating accidents along the way and playing with incompatibilities as much as continuities, while their modular layout opens up infinite possibilities of arrangement in accordance with space and variations of light. The works carry an incessant permeability toward a multiplicity of histories of art and aesthetics, activating a perception that combines macro and micro scales, deep time and futuristic projections. The slow transformation of living forms meets the wanderings, mutations and alterations of the symbol across history and geography. Verboom activates simultaneously the modernist style and its primitive occurrence in an unbridled archeology of forms caught between ancestral knowledge, utopian ideals and cultural hybridization.
Upon graduating from the Paris École nationale supérieure des beaux-arts (2009), Verboom joined the De Ateliers artist-in-residence programme (Amsterdam, 2009/2011). Her recent solo exhibitions include “Pistillus”, Le Voyage à Nantes (Nantes, 2023);“Chryséléphantine”, La Verrière – Fondation d'entreprise Hermès, (Brussels, 2023); “Peptapon”, Le Carré Centre d'art contemporain (Château-Gontier, 2021); La Vitrine, FRAC Ile-de-France (Paris, 2020) and “Lectio Difficilior Potior”, MASC, Museum of the Abbaye de Sainte-Croix (Les Sables, 2015). She has participated in group exhibitions “You Know Who” (Ömer Koç Collection), Abdülmecid Efendi Mansion (Istanbul, 2022); “Against Nature”, MO.CO. Panacée (Montpellier, 2022); “Le Vent se lève”, MAC VAL (Val de Marne, 2020); “Infinite Sculptures: From the Antique Cast to the 3D Scan”, Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation (Lisbon, 2020) & École Nationale Supérieure des Beaux-Arts de Paris (Paris, 2019); “Metamorphosis, Art in Europe Now” and Fondation Cartier (Paris, 2019) among others. She contributed to the installation in the new “Toguna” space at the Palais de Tokyo (2018), has collaborated with Maison Chloé, (2017–2020) and was the recipient of the LVMH Métiers d’Art grant and residency (2018). Her works are present in several public collections, including Fonds national d’art contemporain, Fonds municipal d’art contemporain de la Ville de Paris, FRAC Bretagne, Centro de Arte Dos de Mayo Madrid and MAC VAL.
