"Isabel Clara Eugenia of Spain, 2009" Collage

Marlies Pekarek born 1957 in Berne, Switzerland. Lives and works as an artist and designer in St. Gallen, Switzerland. Studied for 3 years in Zurich for a Bachelor degree and a further 3 years in Lismore, Australia for a MA. The work of Marlies Pekarek is founded on the two principals of reflection and intuition. At every crossing her works are packed with seemingly contrary statements, articulating contradictions that we humans create every day. In her drawings and objects, her photography, collage and installations, Pekarek draws upon the dialogue between inner and outer, individual and mass, right and wrong. All her work, including the Dripping-wet collection products possess content and strength of statement, revolving around the question of being Human, cut loose by a cultural and timely displacement. Marlies Pekarek is offering a series of unusual objects for everyday use. She presents us with a set of soap figures, tentative in appearance, arranged into sequences and groups.The multiple production of these items and the material used, qualifies them as consumer product, and yet these soap figures also act as Communicators, conveying meaning and evoking contemplation: soap is needed for washing; soap is an everyday material; soap has odour. Marlies Pekarek turns the mundane of the everyday object into pieces of sensitive art which put the mechanisms of valuation into question, behind uniformity lies individuality. The polarity of value and trash, art and mass production, meet and cross over. Here, art is consumer product, and consumer product is art.Ursula Badrutt Schoch (artcritic) translated by Rachel Lumsden