MARIE
MATUSZ
INTERVIEW
2026-01-26
Nour Tournier
Nour Tournier
© DORIAN LAFARGUE
(1) Marie Matusz, Reservoir, Kunsthalle Basel, January 17 – April 27, 2025. Images courtesy of Kunsthalle Basel. Photos by Philipp Hänger.
(2) Marie Matusz, Fellow Prisoners in Reservoir, Kunsthalle Basel. Images courtesy of Kunsthalle Basel. Photos by Philipp Hänger.
© DORIAN LAFARGUE
(1) Marie Matusz, The future is already sold, 2019, Aluminium casting, safety glass, grid, cables, metal chain, 3 Elements - each 30x30x20cm
(2) Marie Matusz, The doomed, 2022, Hair mats, 24 x 62 x 32 cm.
© DORIAN LAFARGUE
MARIE
MATUSZ
INTERVIEW
2026-01-26
Nour Tournier
Last spring, sitting around an office table heated by a long work meeting, I felt overwhelmed by an immense pull from my computer screen. I had received the list of artists for the exhibition that would occupy our coming months of activity and thus discovered the practice of Marie Matusz (born in 1994 in Toulouse, lives and works in Basel).
I allowed myself to be caught up by a series of dark glass display cases containing organic forms. Despite the digital nature of the encounter, it was a deeply sensitive desire that pushed me to plunge into the contemplation of the work. The titles, always evocative, guide the viewer toward an additional theoretical understanding. Very quickly, we find ourselves compelled to surrender our time to it, convinced we are spectators of a rare enigma.
A few months later, I had the opportunity to question the artist about the complex relationship between the contours of her practice and the subtle seduction emanating from it.
(1) Marie Matusz, Reservoir, Kunsthalle Basel, January 17 – April 27, 2025. Images courtesy of Kunsthalle Basel. Photos by Philipp Hänger.
(2) Marie Matusz, Fellow Prisoners in Reservoir, Kunsthalle Basel. Images courtesy of Kunsthalle Basel. Photos by Philipp Hänger.
NOUR TOURNIER: What meanings run through your work behind its minimal forms?
MARIE MATUSZ: Above all, I would speak of an attention to experience; that is, to what happens between a body, a space, and an object. The forms I produce are not minimal out of an adherence to an aesthetic, but because stripping things down creates the conditions for a more precise perception. There is a dimension of vulnerability in this formal economy: what is retained is also what is exposed. History, whether intimate or collective, runs through materials and gestures without necessarily naming itself.
TOURNIER: What relationship do you maintain with materials?
MATUSZ: I do not hierarchize them. It is a quality of attention that determines my relationship to them. An industrial material and a found object can produce the same type of presence if they are worked with the same intention. The technological is not excluded, but neither is it privileged. It is simply one register among others. What matters to me is what the material does to the body, to the eye, to space.
A/N: For the exhibition Prequel (2023, Blue Velvet), the use of mechanical engraving on Forex or the crystallization of salt on black wood reflected an acute attention to the manufacturing process. These surface alterations were linked to the concept of faktura, formalized by László Moholy-Nagy in 1929, designating the aesthetic and tactile value resulting from the physical treatment of a material.
This approach also relies on repetition and historical appropriation. For the exhibition Vultures (2022) at Der Tank, the artist reappropriated an 1871 lithography by Honoré Daumier (Épouvantée de l’héritage), replacing the original date with the infinity symbol. Presented in ten identical copies alongside steel mortuary tables, this sequence reactivates the strategies of Appropriation Art to question the circularity of forms in the age of technical and digital reproducibility.
TOURNIER: Is the question of the phenomenological important in your work?
MATUSZ: Yes, it is central. The work seeks to put the spectator in the presence of themselves—and therefore in the presence of their own way of looking, of occupying space, of feeling distance or proximity. It is about creating the conditions for a conscious experience of the body in space, inviting presence.
A/N: Whether through the unstable slate slabs of Lonely Daters (2022), the cast-iron pipes aligned on the floor (Still-Life, Still, 2023), or the photographic prints on glass (Fellow Prisoners, 2025) letting street shadows filter through, the artist engages the spectator's body. The combinations of archival objects, industrial materials, and organic elements (wax, ash, human hair) counter the unambiguous association between form and meaning. In her 2019 work The future is already sold, for example, Matusz uses old bunker lamps stripped of their original utilitarian role. Their form nevertheless imposes a visual bridge between our era, historical memory, and the underground world. On these structures, the artist inscribes textual excerpts taken, among others, from the book And, Phenomenology of the End by the philosopher Franco "Bifo" Berardi. To him is attributed the phrase: "not a presence, but an experience." Time indeed seems suspended here, inviting the observer to the immediate experience of the strata of the past and of memory.
MARIE MATUSZ INTERVIEW
This approach also relies on repetition and historical appropriation. For the exhibition Vultures (2022) at Der Tank, the artist reappropriated an 1871 lithography by Honoré Daumier (Épouvantée de l’héritage), replacing the original date with the infinity symbol. Presented in ten identical copies alongside steel mortuary tables, this sequence reactivates the strategies of Appropriation Art to question the circularity of forms in the age of technical and digital reproducibility.
TOURNIER: Is the question of the phenomenological important in your work?
MATUSZ: Yes, it is central. The work seeks to put the spectator in the presence of themselves—and therefore in the presence of their own way of looking, of occupying space, of feeling distance or proximity. It is about creating the conditions for a conscious experience of the body in space, inviting presence.
A/N: Whether through the unstable slate slabs of Lonely Daters (2022), the cast-iron pipes aligned on the floor (Still-Life, Still, 2023), or the photographic prints on glass (Fellow Prisoners, 2025) letting street shadows filter through, the artist engages the spectator's body. The combinations of archival objects, industrial materials, and organic elements (wax, ash, human hair) counter the unambiguous association between form and meaning. In her 2019 work The future is already sold, for example, Matusz uses old bunker lamps stripped of their original utilitarian role. Their form nevertheless imposes a visual bridge between our era, historical memory, and the underground world. On these structures, the artist inscribes textual excerpts taken, among others, from the book And, Phenomenology of the End by the philosopher Franco "Bifo" Berardi. To him is attributed the phrase: "not a presence, but an experience." Time indeed seems suspended here, inviting the observer to the immediate experience of the strata of the past and of memory.
This approach also relies on repetition and historical appropriation. For the exhibition Vultures (2022) at Der Tank, the artist reappropriated an 1871 lithography by Honoré Daumier (Épouvantée de l’héritage), replacing the original date with the infinity symbol. Presented in ten identical copies alongside steel mortuary tables, this sequence reactivates the strategies of Appropriation Art to question the circularity of forms in the age of technical and digital reproducibility.
TOURNIER: Is the question of the phenomenological important in your work?
MATUSZ: Yes, it is central. The work seeks to put the spectator in the presence of themselves—and therefore in the presence of their own way of looking, of occupying space, of feeling distance or proximity. It is about creating the conditions for a conscious experience of the body in space, inviting presence.
A/N: Whether through the unstable slate slabs of Lonely Daters (2022), the cast-iron pipes aligned on the floor (Still-Life, Still, 2023), or the photographic prints on glass (Fellow Prisoners, 2025) letting street shadows filter through, the artist engages the spectator's body. The combinations of archival objects, industrial materials, and organic elements (wax, ash, human hair) counter the unambiguous association between form and meaning. In her 2019 work The future is already sold, for example, Matusz uses old bunker lamps stripped of their original utilitarian role. Their form nevertheless imposes a visual bridge between our era, historical memory, and the underground world. On these structures, the artist inscribes textual excerpts taken, among others, from the book And, Phenomenology of the End by the philosopher Franco "Bifo" Berardi. To him is attributed the phrase: "not a presence, but an experience." Time indeed seems suspended here, inviting the observer to the immediate experience of the strata of the past and of memory.
(1) Marie Matusz, Reservoir, Kunsthalle Basel, January 17 – April 27, 2025. Images courtesy of Kunsthalle Basel. Photos by Philipp Hänger.
(2) Marie Matusz, Fellow Prisoners in Reservoir, Kunsthalle Basel. Images courtesy of Kunsthalle Basel. Photos by Philipp Hänger.
TOURNIER: What were the major encounters and inspirations during your artistic training?
MATUSZ: Duchamp, for the way he shifted the question of art toward that of the gaze and decision. Rosemarie Trockel, for the tension between the conceptual and the sensible, and her resistance to categories. Reinhard Mucha, for his thinking on space and the memory of objects. And then there were encounters with artists working with light, simultaneously as a material, as a duration, and as an experience of the body in space. That is certainly the thread that runs through everything: light has always been there, whatever form the work takes.
TOURNIER: What do you think of the relationship between art and the political?
MATUSZ: I engage with it, but without needing to over-explicate it. The political is written in practice, in the choices of what is shown, how, for whom, in what context. A work that works on perception, attention, and the presence of the subject is already a political proposition, even if it waves no slogans.
A/N: The political scope of Marie Matusz's work appears to us notably in the very conception of the exhibition apparatus. Her scenographies seem to pay little heed to the artificial separation that museum institutions maintain between the cultural object and everyday life. During her exhibition Reservoir (2025) at the Kunsthalle Basel, the floor entirely covered in gray zinc and the directed lighting constructed a hermetic capsule, cut off from the outside. The mahogany display cases of the Towards Vanishing series (2025)—hybrids between museum furniture and storage reserves—allowed plays of light to shimmer across irregularly placed acrylic plates. The visibility of the work is thereby unsettled, highlighting the role of mediation in the experience.
(1) Marie Matusz, The future is already sold, 2019, Aluminium casting, safety glass, grid, cables, metal chain, 3 Elements - each 30x30x20cm
(2) Marie Matusz, The doomed, 2022, Hair mats, 24 x 62 x 32 cm.
TOURNIER: Do you consider your work to be minimal?
MATUSZ: Not really, or at least not in the historical sense of the term. Minimalism is a precise movement, with specific intentions. My work perhaps shares certain forms, but not necessarily the same premises. I prefer to think in terms of formal economy, attention, and presence rather than belonging to a movement.
TOURNIER: What is your earliest physical memory of minimal art?
MATUSZ: I do not have a precise memory of a single work. Perhaps my first physical experience of minimalism did not come through a gallery. It is the horizon line between the sky and the ocean that comes to mind first, that infinitely simple strip that contains everything. Minimalism as a philosophy has always seemed linked to phenomenology, to a certain solitude of the subject facing what is. That is surely the first memory: a disposition rather than a work.
TOURNIER: Which aspects of minimalism have left the most lasting mark on your work?
MATUSZ: The conviction that reduction is not impoverishment, but intensification. And the idea that the space around the work is part of the work; that emptiness is matter.
Today, the attraction I immediately felt for these tinted display cases or her labyrinths of mirrors seems to me to stem from an impression of free thought, restoring to the exhibition space its full power of reserve. I thank Marie Matusz for these exchanges.
TOURNIER: Do you consider your work to be minimal?
MATUSZ: Not really, or at least not in the historical sense of the term. Minimalism is a precise movement, with specific intentions. My work perhaps shares certain forms, but not necessarily the same premises. I prefer to think in terms of formal economy, attention, and presence rather than belonging to a movement.
TOURNIER: What is your earliest physical memory of minimal art?
MATUSZ: I do not have a precise memory of a single work. Perhaps my first physical experience of minimalism did not come through a gallery. It is the horizon line between the sky and the ocean that comes to mind first, that infinitely simple strip that contains everything. Minimalism as a philosophy has always seemed linked to phenomenology, to a certain solitude of the subject facing what is. That is surely the first memory: a disposition rather than a work.
TOURNIER: Which aspects of minimalism have left the most lasting mark on your work?
MATUSZ: The conviction that reduction is not impoverishment, but intensification. And the idea that the space around the work is part of the work; that emptiness is matter.
Today, the attraction I immediately felt for these tinted display cases or her labyrinths of mirrors seems to me to stem from an impression of free thought, restoring to the exhibition space its full power of reserve. I thank Marie Matusz for these exchanges.
© DORIAN LAFARGUE
