Galerie Greta Meert is delighted to present a solo exhibition by the American artist Marina Pinsky, her first at the gallery. Titled The Wave(s) or Newton’s Rings, the exhibition brings together works in varying media including photography, painting and sculpture utilising glass. The work’s content centres on optics and light phenomena, and weaves together numerous interconnected literary, artistic and architectural protagonists.
The exhibition’s title is partially borrowed from Virginia Woolf’s classic novel The Waves, whose structure overlays the thoughts and narratives of its characters, with each chapter describing the subtle light effects of the sun rising over the sea. Pinsky has attempted to harmonise the varied works in the exhibition as if they were concurrent protagonists, each spinning off from one another, their individual narratives ebbing and flowing together.
Simultaneously, the title refers to The Wave, an anomalous sculptural work by Agnes Martin once shown in an exhibition devoted to games made by artists. Pinsky has long been fascinated by the structure of games and open-ended sequences and logics throughout her works, and this forebear sets the tone for the play of curves and lines that unfolds in relation to the gallery’s architecture.
The artist’s initial studies were in photography, and she posits the role of the camera’s lens as a type of ‘transitional object’, as described by psychoanalyst D.W. Winnicott as an object constitutive of the relationship between mother and child, and which exists in a state of play.
Throughout the exhibition, cutaway diagrams of the compound lens appear in various scales. When expanded to architectural proportions as in the case on the front windows of the gallery, it envelops the viewer, and reacts on the lines and curves of the space itself, thus enacting the play between the spectator and the unique spatial conditions of the gallery.
The gallery and its surroundings are echoed in The Grey Cloth or Ten Percent White, titled after the novel Das graue Tuch und zehn Prozent Weiß by Paul Scheerbart. These semi-circular panels are painted with motifs used as a protection symbol across diverse periods and cultures from at least the bronze age, overlaid with cross-sections of superwide lenses. Their opposing primary colours invite their hanging on opposing walls, and their forms catch glimpses of the curved vaults of the ceiling and the colours of neighbouring buildings.
Pinsky displaces this play of perspectives and time spans to the Alvar Aalto building in Berlin which houses her studio. In the works comprising Dharma Transmission, glass sheets have been slumped in a kiln into reliefs depicting the building’s facade. On the opposite wall, a series of framed photographs capture the outside world from behind this exterior, glimpsed through glass train tracks comprising an earlier work.
Another work, The Crystal Chain consists of clear and coloured fused glass. Through the embedded relief, dividing the light into particles and rippling outwards, one could imagine the effect of a stone bouncing on the surface of water. The waveforms of scattered light move towards the floor in the form of long thin clear and coloured glass bars. These sit atop concrete ‘rumble strips’ fabricated according to the artist’s specifications. As the “waves” of glass run over the “waves” of the rumble strips, they create an interference pattern.
The works in this exhibition ruminate on the qualities of light itself – its excitation of the quantum field and behaviour as both wave and particle. These qualities are then channeled into photographs and objects that behave as models, but imperfect and highly personal models which invite the viewer into an empathic relationship through their plays with transparency and opacity.
Marina Pinsky was born in 1986 in Moscow, and emigrated to New York, USA in 1989. Since 2014, she lives and works in Brussels, and Berlin, Germany.
In 2026 her work is included in group presentations at KANAL Centre Pompidou in Brussels, Amant Foundation in Brooklyn, USA, and the Kölnischer Kunstverein, Cologne, Germany. In early 2027 she will open a solo exhibition at the CAC Synagogue de Delme in France.
