The art of Mariella Mosler (b. 1962, lives and works in Hamburg) operates on the boundary between autonomous sculpture and sitespecific interior ornamentation. She deftly quotes from a wide array of visual idioms ranging from baroque decorum to the airbrushed aesthetic of pop art, from primitivism to the paradigms of modernism. Mosler manufactures arabesques out of fruit gum; ties human hair in intricately shaped knots; pours sand to make reliefs; or creates floor mosaics out of hundreds of pounds of nonpareils. She plays with the ornamental appeal of surfaces and employs highly unusual materials that are familiar from other contexts but now seem strange. The banal suddenly strikes us as exquisite, and apparently chaotic shapes reveal a distinctive order. The creative process is no less important to Mosler than the architectural and situationspecific construction of her wall and floor pictures. The viewer cannot be in doubt about the amount of labor it took to complete one of her huge pieces, which have repeatedly prompted remarks about the artist's wasteful use of her time. One group of works, however, avoid this association: her masks, fantastic objects made out of cardboard, fur, coir, synthetic materials, or bubble wrap whose hollow eyes lend them a timelessly otherworldly appearance. With texts by Nicole Fritz, Hanne Loreck, Ursula PanhansBühler, and Annett Reckert.

Mariella Mosler's art combines a playfulness with archaic, tribal, folk, oriental, ornamental and Pop art with conceptual rigour, coolness and clarity. It operates at all times in the delicate balance between opulence and minimalism, between spontaneity, abundance and formal control. This catalogue documents Mosler's most recent works in Gießen, a sweeping, space-filling floor mosaic made from tiny multicoloured sweets and a wall installation of 60 multi-faceted masks. Opulent indulgence in the material contrasts with rigour in the composition; a sober staging concept provides the backdrop to an exuberant mass of colour.0Exhibition: Kunsthalle Gießen, Germany.