MAREN HASSINGER

20 March - 26 April 2025

MAREN HASSINGER
20 March - 26 April 2025
The waters of the world unite us.

- Maren Hassinger
Installation view at Susan Inglett Gallery, NYC. Photo: Adam Reich
On Dangerous Ground (artist in studio), April 1981

Photo: © Museum Associates/LACMA

Hassinger displays her signature materiality in the form of wire rope and twisted paper, continuing her efforts to transpose the natural world.

I was in a graduate program [at UCLA] called Fiber Structure, and one day I was out and about in Los Angeles searching for different kinds of fibers, and I went to a junkyard on Alameda Street in downtown LA, where there were all of these salvage yards. I was just looking around, and I picked up this piece of wire rope. It was rusty, but I realized that it had the capacity to have everything that you ever do to metal done to it, but you could also treat it like fiber. If you un-plied it, or unwound it, and you kept going deeper and deeper into each ply, it’s lines of metal. I realized I could do very sculptural things with this.

- Maren Hassinger on the origins of wire rope in her practice, 2019
MAREN HASSINGER, GROWING I 2025

This new work is distinctly fluid, echoing forms, patterns, and movements found in natural phenomena, such as waterfalls, wind and rainstorms, and the new life that follows. Growing I and Growing II are cement and wire sculptures, reminiscent of a chain link fence overtaken by an ivy-like growth. While composed of similar metallic materials, the components feel separate, furthering the feeling of the natural encroaching on the manmade.

Hassinger consistently situates the human body at the dynamic intersection of the organic and the industrial, the natural and the cultural. Encouraging movement and, at times, direct participation, she uses her art to forge a sense of connectedness among seemingly disparate things. [1]
Movement is often in my art. I discovered that in the Bible, there is a reference to wind and the garden. Wind in nature is biblically considered the breath of life, it indicates God's presence. In that sense … I felt that I was connecting with some spiritual presence of the earth.

- Maren Hassinger, 2011
MAREN HASSINGER, CASCADE, 2025

Hassinger considers verticality, as multiple suspended works charge the space between the ceiling and floor with dynamic motion. Previous exhibitions saw Hassinger employing twisted and knotted newspaper clippings as commentary on the unification that a serial publication provides, stating, “The New York Times contains stories about worldwide events, in tying and knotting the news it becomes a record of all of us.” These clippings assume a torrential form in Cascade, 2025, a flood of news and information given equal import.

The tightly coiled clippings refuse readability: while one might catch a date, a reference to immigration policy, or a photographic sliver of an Olympic medalist, one is struck above all by the artist’s transformational action, her forceful manual response to an ongoing onslaught of information that is, as the title suggests, at times hard to bear. [2]
A work commissioned by the Art Institute of Chicago, Showers, finds new form at the gallery, turning the dial from gentle rain to torrential downpours. Hassinger ups the ante with a wire-rope lattice of her own creation, and proliferates the woven grid with scores of the steel tendrils. This progression from drizzle to deluge is mirrored by ever-increasing environmental concerns, a foundational aspect of Hassinger's ethos.
- Original installation of Showers, 2023, in This Is How We Grow at The Art Institute of Chicago
MAREN HASSINGER, SHOWERS I , 2025
The paradoxes inherent in Hassinger’s work are readily apparent. Her imitations of nature are both sincere and ironic. She manipulates industrial wire rope to look like natural forms, yet these objects also retain their metallic, unnatural quality. The process of creation is quite evident, and in this sense, Hassinger’s work is akin to process art. Viewers can easily reconstruct the nimble movement of fingers and tools fraying, unraveling, shaping, and arranging. Although there is sometimes the suggestion of the decay, neglect, or displacement of natural forms - the result of human activity - these works also strongly insist on the constructiveness of human touch. Some critics, and even the artist herself, have described her works as expressing a sense of memory, nostalgia, or even mourning for the loss of a closer experience of nature. [3]
MAREN HASSINGER, GROWING II, 2025

While embracing the inherent liquidity of these phenomena, Hassinger also engages an integral part of her practice in the form of weaving, using rigid materials and structural techniques that belie the aqueous, pliant nature of wind and water. Substances deemed stiff and unmoving become malleable and tensile, another added layer of friction to the work.

Hassinger’s forms cultivate a space of introspection and reflection: the natural world is informed by our actions even as we are informed by changes in its architecture. In what ways are we entangled with our environs, Hassinger asks. What do we do with these connections and the memories of these connections? [4]
MAREN HASSINGER, RIPPLES, 2025

In emulating organic forms via inorganic materials, Hassinger considers the reciprocal impact and exchange of humanity and nature.

Gallery rooms of leaning, writhing snake steel cables set in concrete mimicked seaweed growing from the ocean floor set gently swaying in slow motion by the currents. Much of this earlier work explored the problematic relationship of the industrial to the organic, and by inference, of natural chaos to order. [5]
- MAREN HASSINGER, Falls I, 2025
- MAREN HASSINGER, Falls II, 2025
I feel that there’s an absence of nature, yet a proliferation of human-made products which reflect nature, or imitate nature. Wire rope is one such product. When I use materials made by people that resemble things found in nature, like reeds, flowers, trees, etc., I’m also saying that the proliferation of the copies are causing the erasure of the ‘real’ nature. Materials made by people have a tumultuous effect on the survival of nature as we know it. The use of these manufactured materials is both a warning and a plea and suggest a time for nostalgia.

- Maren Hassinger, 2021
MAREN HASSINGER, ROSE LEAF COMPOSITION, 2025
Rose leaves decorate a gallery wall, frozen in stasis using a proprietary formula of Hassinger's design, invented during a 1984-85 residency at the Studio Museum in Harlem. Echoing a foliage-strewn surface of a body of water, the leaves stave off their own decay in defiance of human intervention, assisted by Hassinger's love of nature and wish for its preservation.

I wanted my work to be an overarching statement about nature in our lives now. Our relationship to nature is going to be different than other generations’ relationship to nature because we have damaged so much. I see the loss of nature as intimately connected to people who have created social situations and monetary gains, based on killing nature. Only recently, I got really interested in how the rape of nature and discrimination against certain individuals, certain human beings, are related.

- Maren Hassinger, 2018
By acknowledging the human-nature symbiosis, Hassinger’s work highlights the primordial tethers we all share as stewards of the earth, a reminder of the life-giving forces from which we came.
Installation view, Susan Inglett Gallery, NYC. Photo: Adam Reich
Photo: Grace Roselli, Pandora's BoxX Project

MAREN HASSINGER (b. 1947) has built an interdisciplinary practice that articulates the relationship between nature and humanity. Carefully choosing materials for their innate characteristics, Hassinger has explored the subject of movement, family, love, nature, environment, consumerism, identity, and race. The artist uses her materials to mimic nature, whether bundling it to resemble a monolithic sheaf of wheat or planting it in cement to create an industrial garden. Within the past five years, Hassinger has been commissioned to make work for Sculpture Milwaukee (curated by Ugo Rondinone), Dia Bridgehampton, Socrates Sculpture Park, the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, the Rockefeller Foundation, and the Aspen Art Museum. Hassinger was recently honored with an exhibition focused on her collaborative performance work with Senga Nengudi at the Cooley Gallery, Reed College, Portland, OR traveling to the Columbus Museum of Art, Columbus, OH, and will be honored with an upcoming two-person survey alongside Nengudi at IVAM, Valencia. Hassinger is the recipient of the Women’s Caucus for the Arts Lifetime Achievement Award. Her work can be found in the collections of the Art Institute of Chicago; the Guggenheim Museum, NYC: the Hirshhorn Museum, Washington D.C; the Los Angeles County Museum of Art; the Museum of Modern Art, NYC; the San Francisco Museum of Art; the Walker Art Center, Minneapolis; and the Whitney Museum, NYC, among others.
[1] Susan Richmond for Burnaway Magazine, 2015

[2] Miriam Grotte-Jacobs for ASAP/Review, 2018

[3] Maureen Megerian for Women’s Art Journal, ca. 1996

[4] Jessica Lynne for ARTNews, 2018

[5] Constance Mallinson for Times Quotidian, 2011

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MAREN HASSINGER

MAREN HASSINGER

The waters of the world unite us.

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