Machteld Rullens's Cardboard Art Show at NYC Galleries.

3 hours ago7 min read

The stage is set at Page Gallery and Andrew Kreps Gallery in New York, where Machteld Rullens’s captivating new exhibition unfolds not with the traditional fanfare of oil and canvas, but with the quiet, profound resonance of cardboard. This body of work, conceived during her transformative residency at the Josef and Anni Albers Foundation, feels less like a simple gallery showing and more like a masterfully blocked theatrical production where the humble corrugated sheet is the lead actor.Rullens doesn't just use cardboard; she coaxes a performance from it, bending, layering, and staining the material until it sheds its utilitarian identity and reveals a surprising capacity for emotional depth and formal elegance, much like a gifted performer finding the soul within a minimalist script. Her fascination lies in the material's inherent narrative—the creases that speak of previous folds, the raw edges that whisper of industrial origins, the subtle variations in brown that recall a painter's nuanced palette.This is not mere appropriation of a readymade; it is a deep, almost alchemical investigation into the soul of the everyday, elevating the discarded into the sublime and challenging our very definitions of artistic value and permanence in a way that feels both urgent and timeless. The ghost of Anni Albers, with her own revolutionary work in textiles and her belief in the artistic potential of so-called 'lesser' materials, undoubtedly haunts these galleries, her spirit a silent collaborator in Rullens’s process.By choosing a foundation dedicated to the Bauhaus principles of material honesty and formal purity as her creative incubator, Rullens positions her work within a rich historical lineage of artists who found infinity in limitation. Her cardboard constructions—some standing as fragile monoliths, others pinned to the wall like delicate specimens—engage in a silent, powerful dialogue with the history of modernist abstraction, Minimalism, and Arte Povera, yet they possess a distinctly contemporary voice, one that is acutely aware of consumerism, waste, and the fragile state of our material world.The dual-gallery presentation itself is a clever piece of staging, allowing viewers to trace the evolution of a single idea across two distinct spaces, much like watching the different acts of a play. In an art market often obsessed with durability and preciousness, Rullens’s choice of a transient, vulnerable medium is a radical act.It asks us to consider beauty in the ephemeral, to find strength in fragility, and to listen to the stories told by the objects we so readily cast aside. This is not just a show about cardboard; it is a poignant meditation on memory, transformation, and the quiet, resilient poetry hidden in the folds of our everyday lives, a standing ovation for the beauty of the overlooked.

#featured

#Machteld Rullens

#cardboard art

#gallery exhibition

#Page NYC

#Andrew Kreps Gallery

#Josef and Anni Albers Foundation

#rising artist

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