World Sculpture News
Volume 12 Number 4 Autumn 2006
Adrian Mauriks at
Australian Art Resources
Adrian Mauriks, who emigrated to Australia from Holland in the 1960s, has spent the past two-and-a-half decades making sculptural works that link images and symbols that combine figurative and abstract elements into collections of forms that reflect the natural world and the man-made. All of the works he has made during the past five years, however, have been made of epoxy resin and paint. The large-scale works are reinforced with steel or aluminum. They are white and smooth, yet the artist refers to them as "whitish."
His recent exhibition featured 12 works. Some of these pieces are arrangements of up to 11 forms (assemblage), such as in his Construct 1. Mauriks's art is sculpture as environment. Even the small-scale collections of forms such as Construct 1 draw the viewer in, as in the way one is drawn into the story, Alice in Wonderland. The pieces become monumental and the viewer imagines moving through the space, experiencing organic, pillowy, symbolic forms that have elements of the mythical, abstract, and figurative. The artworks have an erotic sense about them in a similar way to many forms found in flora and fauna. The works charge the zones that they inhabit with sensual and emotional meaning, creating what Paul Carter calls "erotically charged zones." Mauriks, like Swedenborg, espouses the idea of correspondences, the connections between the ethereal and the other world. He acknowledges that some of his forms reflect correspondences, connections between different things, and space and time.
In Construct 1 there is an elongated "triffid" or lily, or a stem with lips on top, there is a budding sheaf from corn, or some other plant, an embryonic creature prostrating, other life forms emerging, a flattened disc, a heart on a stem, and more. Construct 1 is like a family of organic forms: arthropods, triffid-like plants, the bud, the phallus, the fetus, and the bloom. Contrasting with these Mauriks introduces geometry and man-made elements, in the forms of cubes, circles, discs, and spheres. The work is reminiscent of a forest in white that Miro might have made. Yet, many of the sculptures have swollen, curved surfaces, that often reference embryonic forms, either plant, animal, human, or "man-made" and symbolic.
There is a science fiction element within the work. They are conceptual landscapes you move through, physically and mentally. You can imagine the sculptures being placed in an environment with an option to have them move around and be rearranged in the landscape. The works are restful and organic, and most depict non-specific natural forms that merge and intermingle, conversing in their own language. The sculptures also play dramatically with light and shadow, and the shadows become an extension of the art.
Construct 2 dwarfs us. The work consists of two "gateways" at different levels, a strange half human, half-alien figure, and a tree or plant form.
Walking through the collection, you want to touch them. You become aware of the space, how it feels, and the strangeness of the experience. You can walk through the art, around it, stand in amongst the forms, and see through them. There is a monumentality to all his sculpture that contrasts starkly with the geometric straight lines of much modern architecture.
Swimmer, like Construct 2, also has a gateway, which is a common theme in Mauriks's work. Sometimes the gate-way—"both entry and exit to the piece"-comes in the form of the symbol or in an organic, plantlike arch. Swimmer portrays an abstracted figure traveling through imagined water toward a gateway. There are references to birth. The forms in the work are phallic and include a figure with a head like a breast.
Sandy Caldow
