Oh, Wilderness

“Verbal sculptures” and “strange archaeologies”—Maria Loboda’s recent works expose prior events through sparse details of entangled secrets, material contradictions, and masked collusions. Her sculpture is both indulgently verbal and obstinately reserved. Oh, Wilderness also demonstrates the artist’s aesthetic equation between language and materiality as it works the other way around, translating materials expressive of a certain weak semiotics to language. Through these materials, nature is observed and read—now constituting a grammar, rigorously arbitrary, formal, and conventional.

The book contains a Q&A between Loboda, Caterina Riva, and Isobel Harbison, which traces the artist’s work and context. An essay by Riva highlights Loboda’s use of antagonisms, duality, and enigmas in her practice; Lars Bang Larsen points to a state of echoing and spiritualization in Loboda’s works; and Harbison analyzes the engagement with history and artifact in Loboda’s new approach to sculpture.

Oh, Wilderness is Loboda’s first monograph and contains work from 2009 to 2012.