Maria Rubinke: Fragile psyche

Maria Rubinke studied at the School of Glass and Ceramics on Bornholm in 2008. Later she has exhibited at Haugar Vestfold Museum of Art in Norway and the Civic Museum Bassano del Grappa in Italy, and most recently she has presented a comprehensive solo exhibition, Fragile, at the Vejle Art Museum in 2012. Like the surrealists, Maria Rubinke thematizes the complexity of the human psyche and works in a formal idiom all her own. It’s the combination of her skilled hand the formality of porcelain that makes these surreal little cherubs so haunting.  The Danish artist works with the classic porcelain figure, where she allows the incomprehensible and chaotic in the human subconscious to rise to the surface. The pure white porcelain surface attracts the gaze of the viewer, but at the same time distorts our presuppositions when the small porcelain girls are slowly broken down and subjected to contrast-filled madness. They sink down and seem to drown in the thick mud of the bog and are fatally bitten by a snake.