Municipal Bonds is twice pleased to inaugurate our new, expanded space at Minnesota Street Project with Zaida Oenema: Broken Suns, on view from October 4 to November 25, 2023. The Dutch/Finnish artist’s second solo exhibition with the gallery presents her dynamic yet contemplative reliefs on paper. Drawn, cut, burned, and folded—Oenema’s new body of work features meticulous abstractions of ephemerality in nature.

Centered on the pursuit of silence, Oenema’s practice extends beyond the mere absence of human sound to encapsulate an inner stillness. Stillness, in Oenema’s context, signifies inner peace, wonder, and deliberate deceleration. It assumes the form of positive emptiness from within, affording an actual space for the renewal of perception. For her, this allows for contemplation of the natural world, and its temporal moments in an ever-changing environment.

She sees her work as a silent composition, with a continuous, harmonious structure: “I need to be hyper-focused to make my work. To do this, I must look for moments of stillness as a time of rest in the image plane. My eyes must be able to wander or scan the surface as if I am looking for a horizon that is not there, as a concentrated way of observing. I like the idea that my lengthy work process also results in a lengthy viewing process that will open up space for one's own reflection.”

Oenema’s work is characterized by extreme eye-hand deftness while exploring bold colors, reductive forms, and geometric patterns. She employs pastel and watercolor, scalpel and soldering iron, to create compositions devoid of central focal points, immersive in their vastness. The grid is a foundational element for Oenema, providing a framework for both order and freehand drawing with her tools. “I see my work as a score consisting of a continuo, or the base—the grid in my case—over which the melody weaves itself and where my hand-cutting and burning provide the right vibration. The concentration or focus is inherent to my work.” Emphatically, her process is marked by the rigor of human touch rather than mechanical construct. 

Sculpturally considered, Oenema's technique blurs the boundaries between two-dimensional and three-dimensional. She creates rhythmic patterns of incision and repetition—forming vivid color fields of sawtooth grass, broken suns with dappled light, and burned raindrops on the ocean. The results are an energetic yet consonant surface, where texture responds to changes in light and viewing angle. Much like gazing upon the sea, Oenema aspires her work to be experienced as a unified whole, akin to the mutable nature of water, transformed by tides and fractured by light. “If I can look at my work like I look at the sea, I am satisfied. If unity predominates and my eyes can wander smoothly over the surface, then the work is in balance for me.”

Municipal Bonds