The deceptive visual equivalence between a photographic image and the fragment of reality immortalized is founded on a series of reductions: the volume of objects collapses onto the surface of the negative, matter dissolves into optical trace and spatial depth translates into gradations of light and shadow. Nataly Maier (Munich, 1957) begins at the end of the eighties to question herself about what happens at the visual and conceptual level when one attempts to restore to photography the physical and volumetric consistency that it can only suggest through representative codes. At Fondazione Sabe per l’arte in Ravenna the exhibition Immagini nello spazio (Images in space) focuses on a nucleus of works created by her between 1989 and 1995 (before dedicating herself entirely to painting) in which the tension between the regime of image and that of object feeds a creative procedure that transcends disciplinary boundaries to situate itself in a zone of indetermination in which photography and sculpture contaminate each other without resolving into synthesis.
Nataly Maier, “Immagini nello spazio”, installation view at Fondazione Sabe per l’arte, Ravenna, ph. Daniele Casadio, courtesy Fondazione Sabe per l’arte
The photosculptures summoned in the exhibition space materialize an apparently simple intuition: if photography compresses the depth of the world onto a two-dimensional surface, to restore volume to the printed image one must physically construct the space that the represented object would have occupied. This operation entails a tautological short circuit according to which if on one hand the photograph of the lemon becomes the lemon itself through the incorporation of the fruit’s form, on the other hand the superimposition between image and object never resolves into identity, since the doubling between photographic surface and material volume maintains visible the distance that separates representation from thing. Coincidence is affirmed and denied at the same time: the photographed lemon is the real lemon insofar as it occupies exactly its space, but remains irreducibly other. In Arancio, Limone (1992) the two fruits (enlarged but plausible in their reciprocal dimensional relations) lie on the ground at the center of the room cut in half like a piece of contemporary still life, from which they differ because the internal section that should reveal the pulp appears photographed in black and white, while the external hemispheres maintain the orange and yellow of natural peels. The two objects double along the cutting plane: on one side the chromatic and tactile presence of the external surface, on the other the photographic trace of the organic interior. Here photography, adhering to the object like a membrane, triggers a bilateral transformation in which neither the photograph remains pure image nor the object remains pure matter.
Nataly Maier, “Immagini nello spazio”, installation view at Fondazione Sabe per l’arte, Ravenna, ph. Daniele Casadio, courtesy Fondazione Sabe per l’arte
The principle of doubling and scission, fundamental leitmotiv of Maier’s research, is declined in a variety of configurations in which objects seem divided between physical presence and photographic representation, as if each thing simultaneously contained its own materiality and its own image without the two dimensions ever being able to fully coincide. In Albero Girevole (1991) a true vertical trunk supports a pair of photographic discs intersected along the vertical diameter on which the image of the foliage crown appears, as if the upper part of the tree had been sectioned and replaced by the two-dimensional projection of one of its visual portions. One could define this last operation as a sort of metonymic slippage, rhetorical device that the artist also experiments with to transform an entire landscape into domestic and transportable object. In Mare in scatola (1994), for example, three metallic containers placed side by side on the ground filled with photographed sardines, canning the sea through its inhabitants, evoke by contiguity the marine element from which they come, but at the same time transform the immensity of natural landscape into the concreteness of packaged merchandise.
Nataly Maier, “Immagini nello spazio”, installation view at Fondazione Sabe per l’arte, Ravenna, ph. Daniele Casadio, courtesy Fondazione Sabe per l’arte
As urban counterpart to Albero Girevole, in San pietrini (1995) a tower of dice covered with photographs of the porphyry cubes evoked by the title rises as abstract construction in which the documentation of urban material becomes decorative texture applied to constructivist volumes. The photographed sampietrini acquire an illusory tactile presence that contrasts with the geometric rigidity of the cubes, generating a perceptual ambiguity in which the materiality of the represented subject and the abstraction of the sculptural composition coexist without resolving. Photography covers the form like a skin that transports the image of the world onto theoretical architectures, and this juxtaposition highlights the distance that separates the two dimensional regimes even when they seem to converge. Other works, like Fotoscultura con salice (1994), insist on the critical threshold at which photography gives way to the physical presence of the object. Here, a wall panel covered by a photographic texture of willow branches is interrupted at the point where true vegetal branches begin to project into the upper space, as if representation were forced to yield to the thing due to the impossibility of the image to contain the volume required by the object. This impossible continuity underlines the constitutive limit of photography: the image can document form but cannot restore the space that form occupies, and when this space becomes necessary representation must transform into presence or admit its own insufficiency
Nataly Maier, “Immagini nello spazio”, installation view at Fondazione Sabe per l’arte, Ravenna, ph. Daniele Casadio, courtesy Fondazione Sabe per l’arte
In parallel to the photosculptures, Maier develops a second line of research through diptychs in which black and white photographs of natural elements are juxtaposed with monochromatic pictorial fields. In the triptych Primitivi (2001), for example, the black and white photographic image (in negative, since the solids are white and the voids black) of a tuft of wild grasses is placed beside an orange rectangle and a yellow one, as if the color that traditional photography compresses in the grayscale were extracted and materialized on the adjacent pictorial surface. In this way the artist divides the image from its color following a logic analogous to that which separates the object from its form: if photosculpture restores volume to the flat image, the diptych restores chromaticity to photography through the mediation of painting. Color, placed next to the photograph as autonomous element, maintains with the latter a relationship of complementarity without fusion. This systematic strategy of separation and recomposition reveals the artist’s methodicity in the analysis of the constitutive components of representation. Maier proceeds through subtraction and re-assemblage: she removes from photography its two-dimensionality to give it volume, subtracts color from it to materialize it elsewhere, separates image from object to then reconnect them through hybrid configurations in which neither one nor the other maintains its original status. This analytical process does not pursue harmonious synthesis of media, but maintains visible the fracture that separates them, letting representation and presence coexist in a state of unresolved tension
Nataly Maier, “Immagini nello spazio”, installation view at Fondazione Sabe per l’arte, Ravenna, ph. Daniele Casadio, courtesy Fondazione Sabe per l’arte
The conceptual precision of this research does not slip into the analytical coldness characteristic of much art from the seventies, but maintains an affective quality that emerges from the choice of subjects and the way they are treated. The citrus fruits, the tree, the sardines, the sampietrini belong to the repertoire of ordinary things that populate daily experience, and this familiarity serves not only to facilitate perceptual access to the work, but reveals an attitude of almost childlike curiosity toward the visible world. The amazement that accompanies the discovery of how things are made, the wonder before the internal structure of a lemon or the texture of the lunar surface, constitute the emotional component that permeates the methodological rigor of the investigation. The visual pleasantness of these works does not derive therefore from superficial communicative strategies, but from the conviction that even the most rigorous theoretical investigation can maintain a vital link with the emotional experience of vision. The Ravenna exhibition permits grasping the coherence of a path that through different instruments maintains firm a multifaceted questioning on the nature of the image and on its relationship with the reality it pretends to represent. The image that acquires volume and the object that doubles into representation constitute the two faces of an operation that interrogates the possibility of restoring the real through means of representation that by their nature always introduce a distance, a reduction and a transformation that no formal strategy can completely annul.
Info:
Nataly Maier. Immagini nello spazio
curated byi Cristina Casero
24/01/2026 – 12/04/2026
Fondazione Sabe per l’arte
Via Giovanni Pascoli 31, Ravenna
www.sabeperlarte.org
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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