Marena Seeling

Lives and works in Nijmegen (NL)

Marena’s work is all about space. Marena Seeling uses the photos she makes of spaces and situations that strike her; and these images are appropriated and transformed. Alienation is never an end in itself; the aim is, as so often in modern painting, to initiate a conversation between reality, memory, image and paint in which each party voices its desires. In doing the work, she discovers what she wants to say. There is no pre-determined meaning, and it’s the work on the image that discovers and reveals meaning.

Marena Seeling expresses the origin of her painting succinctly as a memory of her childhood in the village of Weurt, on the Waal River, facing the city of Nijmegen: “This side of the dike establishes another mood, another me, than the other side of the dike. When I stand here and look, I see something different, I perceive differently than when I stand there and observe from there. When I move I leave a space behind, but I also take it with me as a memory, already seeing something else.” (text by Cees De Boer)