Magali Reus (1981, The Hague) lives and works in London. She creates sculptures that transform seemingly familiar everyday objects, detaching them from their usual functions to form intricate accumulations of images and materials. Eschewing the use of readymade objects, she employs a combination of advanced technologies and traditional craftsmanship to produce works that playfully reinterpret the recognizable aspects of reality. Her sculptures reference a wide range of contexts—art-historical, aesthetic, social, geographical, and political—while remaining deeply attuned to the seductive qualities of surface and texture. Reus refers to the works as “unreal things,” highlighting their imaginative departure from the expected. 

A native of Scheveningen, near the North Sea, Reus draws inspiration from the landscapes of her upbringing—landscapes that also frame our museum. For this exhibition, she has created a new body of work firmly rooted in these surroundings. Highlights include wall-mounted sculptures inspired by antique fishing hooks, designed to “hook” the viewer both literally and metaphorically, and monumental freestanding pieces, evoking skeletal remains such as fishbones, hollowed shell-like forms, and other casings left behind by marine life, arranged throughout the exhibition space to reflect natural scatterings of marine elements across the ocean floor.  

The exhibition also features key works from Reus’s celebrated  Merlin  series of fish tins, on loan from prominent Dutch and Belgian collections, offering a compelling dialogue between her past and present explorations. 

Conceptually rooted in the exploration of silhouettes and visual outlines, the works explore the act of attraction and deception—flirting to entice, lure, or mislead the viewer. They will be accompanied by site-specific displays and architectural interventions made by Reus and inspired by the museum’s local context to anchor the exhibition within its historical and cultural surroundings. This connection aims to evoke a sense of familiarity and recognition, to engage you in an intricate dialogue between the works, the site, and their shared references. 

Curator: Louise Bjeldbak Henriksen.