Dutch artist Milena Naef, who was born in a family that has been interested in sculpture for four generations and grew up at her father’s sculpture school in Sweden, continues her current works in Amsterdam. Naef, who directs her artistic life by questioning the traditional approach of stone carving in her family, states that marble plays an important role in her works. Thinking that her relationship with the material is a powerful element in creating her own practice, the artist creates a performative interaction space by visualizing her mental and physical experiences from an artistic perspective in her works. Naef creates a unique visual language by using marble in a contemporary and conceptual way, with her works generally consisting of objects or sculptures that are in contact with the body.
“Fleeting Parts”: Marble Meets Body
Inspired by the idea of the body being in constant “choreography” with its environment, Naef defines the inevitable existence of the body through its interaction with its physical environment. The artist’s ability to shape and manipulate the materials in the “Fleeting Parts” collection, which allows us to fit, enhance and reflect our living spaces, turns into a physical discovery.
In her works in the collection, the young artist questions the part-whole relationship of nature by bringing together the spaces she specially designed on marble blocks with her own body as a complementary element. Naef’s ability to fit precise and millimeter measurements in her relationship with the material is a carefully planned process. Even if it is only for a momentary performance, the artist presents this defining moment with the mental unity of the relationship between a concretely existing structure and the human form, reminding that all the elements in nature take place in the human body.
We have the opportunity to feel the dilemma of whether the artist is dressed in marble or does marble turn into the artist’s dress in her works, in which she brings compelling meanings and definitions to the limits of the body, as if exhibiting a critical aesthetic attitude towards the sculpture aesthetics of the Ancient Greek and Roman periods. As the physical form it takes on gives the impression of a process in which it will solidify or disappear over time, the artist’s active attitude towards her own body becomes more and more rigid. At the same time, Naef’s performances, which created a new collage image, present nature-body integrity by creating an alternative to the collage compositions created by sticking some materials on a surface as we know it in the traditional sense. By questioning the physical and mental expansions of a subjective experience, the artist reveals to what extent natural structures manipulate or liberate our body, with the concept of time.