The premise from which the practice of Dutch artist Anneke Eussen (Kerkrade, 1978, lives in Vaals) moves, whose first solo exhibition in Italy is currently on view at Galleria Studio G7 in Bologna, is the intuition that time has a material consistency. The first consequence is the idea that materials (those most frequented by her are glass, marble and metal) are depositaries of durations, stratifications and lived moments that persist in matter even when the original function has ceased. Based on these premises, every subsequent technical and compositional choice configures itself as a gesture of listening toward what time has deposited on the surface of materials infiltrating deeply into their most intimate structures and toward that dimension of value (generated, lost, reinvented) that its sedimentation distributes on materials with the same indifference with which it consumes them.
Anneke Eussen, “If only…”, installation view at Galleria Studio G7, courtesy the artist and Galleria Studio G7, Bologna
The genesis of work on glass, now her principal element, derives from an involuntary discovery. Returned to her hometown after years spent in Berlin, Eussen visits her grandfather’s and father’s abandoned workshop, a company that for decades had repaired automobiles and construction machinery. In a corner she finds a deposit of replacement glass panels for vehicles, sheets forgotten for sixty years, covered with dust and rendered useless by the obsolescence of the models for which they were destined. She takes them to her studio waiting to understand what to do with them, and there they remain for a long time, until the moment when a casual displacement reveals something unexpected: the superimpositions between the sheets produce shadows, new drawings and new color zones, which the single piece retains only in the encounter with another. From this crucial juncture, her entire research concentrates in translating into visible matter the idea of temporal circularity that appears to her in that moment blatant: if the past is fixed, the present is the only moment in which one can add something, and what one obtains already belongs to the future. From then on, Eussen begins to work systematically with fragments: she arranges them on the studio floor, superimposes them, reorganizes them, constructing compositions in which the shards and irregular edges of broken sheets become elements of a formal vocabulary all her own, capable of holding together the casualty of fracture and the precision of compositional gesture. The artist’s most recent works, presented in this exhibition, testify to a further evolution with respect to her previous process: if until now she had always worked with found materials, already broken and marked by others’ time, now the starting elements are glass sheets commissioned to a glass studio specialized in architectural restorations, therefore virgin surfaces, historically empty, on which she herself produces the fracture. Cutting becomes the foundational gesture of this phase, in which the artist accepts the challenge of starting from zero to construct her own formal vocabulary.
Anneke Eussen, “If only…”, installation view at Galleria Studio G7, courtesy the artist and Galleria Studio G7, Bologna
To this typology belong the large compositions in plexiglass frame from the If only series, where strips of ground glass of varying widths arrange themselves one next to the other like columns of an imaginary architecture. From the quiet choreographies generated by the subtle shadows projected by the edges emerges a subtle grammar of alignments, in its evanescence tenaciously refractory to every visual attempt at stabilization. The vertical modules identify irregular alignments, as if they were the structure of a wait, while the soft horizontal band, almost biological, generated by the intersection of their staggered profiles traverses the verticality in curve cutting its rigid geometry and depositing there an intermediate horizon. In this way the title of the series, If only…, expression with which one designates in English both retrospective regret and conditional desire, finds its visual form: a line that separates and joins, that precipitates and rises, that at a distance almost disappears dissolving in the white of the background while in physical presence reveals itself as plane of oscillation between what has been and what could be. Transparency makes it so that every displacement (and reflection) of the spectator’s body modifies the superimpositions and redistributes the shadows, rewriting the composition, to the point that the work exists fully only in the time of the visit and in movement. The chromatism of the three works, turned to warm yellow, to aqua green and to almost-transparent, follows a mnemonic and affective logic.
Anneke Eussen, “If only…”, installation view at Galleria Studio G7, courtesy the artist and Galleria Studio G7, Bologna
Eussen associates colors with personal memories, with seasons or with specific moments of light: the light blue of the works from the One wish series, for example, is for the artist the color of the first clear sky after winter, a tonality that in turn functions as temporal threshold, as passage between the closed and the open. Color in her work serves to situate form in time rather than to qualify it aesthetically: each tint is a date, an hour of the day, an atmospheric condition sedimented in affectivity. The emotional specificity of each chromatism remains unexpressed in the title and accessible only through the artist’s biography, yet it acts in the quality of light that the sheets return to space, a luminosity always slightly dimmed, like the memory of something that was glimpsed. If the works from the If only series unfold vertically, expansive, almost pictorial in the restrained gesturality of the bands, the elements from the One wish series contract in a tight geometry. They are sheets of recycled glass of intense color, cut into rectangles that fit together like tiles of a cloisonné stained glass, with sporadic settings of yellow glass. These inserts, minuscule squares that occupy a corner or a joint of the composition, punctuate the grid with golden reverberations. They are incidences, thresholds that open the structure to something irreducible to geometry: a desire, an expectation, the trace of a flash of light that resists the seriality of format. The tension between system and anomaly that in If only unfolds in the co-presence between different horizons, concentrates here in a punctiform dimension, a sort of title in apex, an over-tone exceeding the pentagram.
Anneke Eussen, “If only…”, installation view at Galleria Studio G7, courtesy the artist and Galleria Studio G7, Bologna
Open Angles, finally, introduces into the exhibition a matter of different quality and different weight. The chipped marble frames of which it is composed are chipped and dismissed fragments of a monumental architecture, the State Library of Berlin from which they were recovered during renovation works of the building. For the artist working those marbles means entering into simultaneous contact with the geological eras and historical epochs inscribed in their natural and cultural past and recognizing herself as minimal element of a system of incomprehensible duration. From this awareness was born the structure of the work: two mirrored L-forms, composed of sheets juxtaposed by continuity of fracture, suspended from black wires stretched vertically so as to identify two directions that attract each other holding themselves in unstable equilibrium. The contrast between the gravity of marble and the lightness of wires translates into visual terms that temporal disproportion, incarnating the weight of what endures and the subtlety of the gesture that is added to it. If only… is an exhibition of small scale and long duration, where Eussen constructs discrete objects, capable of expanding the perceived time in the space that surrounds them. In the tension between desire for recomposition and impossibility of completion that hovers in this system of relations emerges an ethics of attention toward the residual life of things much more participatory than a generic poetics of fragment in celebrating the circularity of a time that lets itself be at times inhabited, even only in the interstice between two imperceptible disconnections.
Info:
Anneke Eussen. If only…
10/02/2026 – 25/04/2026
testo critico di Rossella Farinotti
Galleria Studio G7
via Val d’Aposa 7/a, Bologna
www.studiog7.it
Graduated in art history at DAMS in Bologna, city where she continued to live and work, she specialized in Siena with Enrico Crispolti. Curious and attentive to the becoming of the contemporary, she believes in the power of art to make life more interesting and she loves to explore its latest trends through dialogue with artists, curators and gallery owners. She considers writing a form of reasoning and analysis that reconstructs the connection between the artist’s creative path and the surrounding context.
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