Midway through my conversation with Magali Reus, we are interrupted by a courier. They\u2019ve arrived at the artist\u2019s studio to deliver an important package \u2013 one of the final components of a sculpture being finalised for Reus\u2019s show Swimming By Night at the Perimeter in London.<\/p>\n
The studio is filled with such sculptures, all in various stages of completion. Reus likes to take everyday, often disposable, items \u2013 pizza boxes and sardine tins among them \u2013 and recreate them on a larger-than-life scale. One of them \u2013 vast looming fish hook lures made to look like uncanny cupcake cases or severed skeletal limbs \u2013 looms nearby, resting against a studio wall.<\/p>\n
\u2018Let\u2019s Hang\u2019 \u2026 Rig (All Eyes On), 2025. Photograph: Courtesy of the Artist and Mai 36 Galerie, Zurich<\/p>\n
Born in the Netherlands and now based in London, Reus has shown in institutions across Europe and the US over the last few years, with her sculptures often responding to the specific details of buildings such as the Kunstverein Freiburg in Freiburg im Breisgau, Germany, and Kunsthalle Wien in Vienna, Austria. Her practice comments on our world of overconsumption and the fast disposing of objects that have served their purpose. \u201cOur understanding of objects is one of a quick transaction,\u201d she says.<\/p>\n
Reus tells me that when someone is first confronted by her sculptures, her hope is that they will seem simultaneously familiar and alien. Often, her work takes objects that would normally be briefly used then thrown away, and turns them into something more physically robust and imposing.<\/p>\n
At first glance, works from her series Subs are made to look like discarded pizza boxes \u2013 but their aluminium construction and meticulously ripped and hand-hammered edges reveal something much less disposable. \u201cWe live in a world of extreme overproduction, consumption and waste,\u201d Reus says. Inside the \u201cpizza boxes\u201d that make up Subs are images of discarded Christmas trees, objects that have a brief, but meaningful, space in our lives.<\/p>\n
\u201cIn December, we gather around it, decorate it and sing beside it,\u201d says Reus. \u201cFor a brief period of time it is a totemic, almost monumental presence in our home. By January, it lies forlorn in the street or has been thrust headfirst into a bin.\u201d<\/p>\n