Zaida Oenema: A Clear Day

Opening Reception | Saturday, February 19, 2022 | 12–5 pm

Artist Reception | Saturday, March 5, 2022 | 3–7 pm

"In absolute focus, I search for silence. Not in the sense of lacking human sound, but rather as stillness; as an equivalent of inner peace, wonder, and slowing down. Silence as a form of positive emptiness, so that there is an actual space to be able to see and perceive the things around you anew."

Municipal Bonds is delighted to announce Zaida Oenema's debut exhibition in the United States, A Clear Day, on view February 19–April 16, 2022. The Dutch/Finnish artist's work features abstractions of the natural world, cut and burned into reliefs on paper. Inspired by the environment’s temporal moments—moving shadows, rippling water, waving fields—Oenema's work is a meditation on cultivating clarity, the resonance of quietude.

With a sensibility for distilling both mind and matter, Oenema tethers to monochrome and minimalism. Her approach appears as a concentrated structure, involving restrained color and reductive form. Based in The Hague, the Netherlands, Oenema explores a palette connected to the nearby North Sea coastline, in shades of blue and grey, pervasive white, warm yellow, and an occasional anchor of black. And her geometric shapes and patterns act as her own language, appearing in her work as familiar symbols derived from nature.

Using pen and pencil, scalpel and soldering iron, Oenema renders work on the border of two-dimensional and three-dimensional. With extreme eye-hand precision, she meticulously sculpts line and surface through the rhythmic action of incision and repetition. Working with recurrent forms—burned circles of suns, incised blades of grass, cut saw-tooth waves—her picture plane is at once orderly and dynamic. As such, the surface changes with the interplay of material, texture, and its response to light.

Oenema employs the grid as a foundational element of her work, for its formal restraint yet conversely for its inherent liberation, which allows for her free-hand drawing with blade and iron tip. Her technical rigor is less systematic or machine-like, more conductive and human. "I see my work not only as an abstraction, but as a kind of conversation or a musical score with a continuo, a harmonic structure, in it. The human hand provides the vibration to create its melody."

municipalbonds.art