Mariana Castillo Deball “Paregon”

Mariana Castillo Deball turned heads at dOCUMENTA(13) with Uncomfortable Objects, a large-scale sculpture based on a formula by the mathematician Felix Klein (1849-1925). Comprising Stucco marble on steel, the gently curving structure integrates copies of artifacts among other sundry bric-a-brac, resulting in a surface that riffs on archeology as a decorative form.

Mariana Castillo Deball, Parergon, installation view Hamburger Bahnhof – Museum für Gegenwart – Berlin. Copyright Staatliche Museen zu Berlin, Nationalgalerie, Thomas Bruns.

The 2013 Nationalgalerie Prize Winner now presents Parergon, a project developed specifically for the historic hall at Berlin’s Hamburger Bahnhof. This large-scale installation devotes itself to the “biographies of things” and examines the migration and reorganization of the museum’s collections, buildings, exhibits and protagonists. The exhibition’s title means “supplementary” or “accessory” in Greek, yet the artist creates such a fluid dialogue between her own works and the cast of artifacts and relics that she from the museum that it’s unclear which one should be considered supplemental. The exhibition will be on view through March 1, 2015.

Installation of Mariana Castillo Deball’s exhibition Paregon at Hamburger Bahnhof

Ethos und Pathos. Die Berliner Bildhauerschule 1786 – 1914, exhibition opening at Hamburger Bahnhof, 1990. Copyright Landesarchiv Berlin, F Rep. 290, 316540. Photo: Ingeborg Lommatzsch.

Research material for the exhibition Mariana Castillo Deball. Parergon. Copyright Staatliche Museen zu Berlin, Nationalgalerie im Hamburger Bahnhof, photo: Mariana Castillo Deball, 2014.