Stretching time with art

With her work, Marinka Reuten explores our awareness of time. Why does time sometimes seem to fly by, while at other moments it drags on unbearably slowly?
With work that forces the viewer to first let go of every thought, Reuten seeks to draw attention to what is usually overlooked: the moment that doesn't unfold elsewhere, but here, in immediate proximity. Her paintings are a call to abandon haste

On this website only a selection of works are shown. Feel free to get in touch if you'd like to see more.

Monochromes

Marinka Reuten paints with slow-drying acrylic paint. With it, she builds up layer upon layer. Her paintings can have more than 20 layers. Despite this approach, the canvases evoke a volatile quality, as if they could simply drift away.
A recurring thread in her paintings is the sense that everything simply slips by: light that disappears, memories that fade. What we see is a borderland between what is yet to come and what has already passed.

To paintings

Photography

Marinka's photographs echo this idea: they show that life always continues, even though we are only part of it for a short time. And that’s exactly where beauty lies.
'For me, impermanence isn’t a gloomy idea, it’s reassuring. The fact that everything continues is comforting to me. That awareness is what my work aims to deepen. It’s what stretches time.'

To photography

Stripes

Where Marinka zoom's out in her monochrome paintings, in the stripe paintings she takes an opposite approach. The stripes, patterns, and structures are an intimate, almost obsessive focus on the smallest moment. They represent an attempt to grasp transience, to not only understand the fleeting nature of life but to embrace it. For it is in this repetition, in this simplicity, that comfort arises. A single stripe may seem insignificant, but within the larger composition, it finds its meaning.

To more stripe-paintings