The Salon by NADA and The Community

‘Confession’ Series (2024)

‘Confession (Seal Strip)’ was commissioned and recently exhibited in the sculpture garden of Middelheim Museum Antwerp and is part of a work series depicting aluminum casted church pews ornated with various objects. In the case of the exhibited artwork, the pew is embellished with an insulation seal strip from a household refrigerator.

This new body of work extends from Grabuschnigg’s ‘Cold Storage’ and ‘Single Fridge’ series, but here manages to shift the attention to the collective and ritualistic. While released from an obvious religious heft, reduced to fragments and decorated with mundane items, the pew taps into a different type of unresolved longing – one that may find a more apt satisfaction within the realms of sociality, history, and our communal past.

Decontextualized from their original religious locations, the pieces still retain a meditative feel, a sense of hope and promise, that brings an additional layer of sensitivity into Grabuschnigg’s practice and interlaces with the turmoil that animates her work.