Marianne Maric

?When men die, they enter history. When statues die, they enter art. This botany of death is what we call culture.?
So begins Statues Also Die (1953) by Alain Resnais and Chris Marker.

Marianne Maric reclaims this statement as a banner, titling a photographic series in which this "botany of death" is reversed. Her models ? friends and muses, nude or semi-nude ? interact physically with marble and bronze statues. Acrobatic, whimsical, always erotic, these stagings seem to reawaken the sculptures through contact with the living. This love of statues has a name: agalmatophilia.

?Many accounts suggest that our relationship with artworks may be closer to passionate love and its fetishistic variants than to the serene, contemplative delight usually attributed to the connoisseur. From love of art to love itself, is it only a short step?? writes neurologist and historian of science Laura Bossi in On Agalmatophilia (2012).

Since Ovid?s Metamorphoses, where Pygmalion falls for the statue brought to life by Venus, the boundary between art and life wavers between human illusion and divine enchantment. In Maric?s series, that ambiguity endures: her models, caught in the flash and frozen by the pose, seem themselves turned to stone. Through this tension ? between sculpture coming to life and the living body turning to sculpture ? the artist questions the status of the model: mere object of desire or acting subject? In Maric?s work, the model becomes a double agent ? both desiring and desired ? challenging established categories of art and gaze.