Maaike Schoorel

The Garden

The Garden is one of the most important works Maaike Schoorel has made to date, a triptych that has as its subject matter a garden scene with what looks like a pond. One of her largest works, it seems highly suited to a Parisian collection where Monet’s Nympheas in the Orangerie represent the summit of treatments of such subjects. Typically for Schoorel, the painting is as much about absence as presence and examines the amount of information the viewer needs to construct meaning. Delicate stains and touches of paint describe the subject which is contingent and evanescent. These are paintings that require slow readings, allowing the eye to adjust and to assemble information. Time is an important theme in the work; not simply the time it takes to decipher it but time associated with memory, a faculty the painting appears to emblematize. Like all Schoorel’s work, the painting is based on a photograph and therefore a scene she experienced. The temporality of the work is not that of the camera from which the image is derived, but that of painting itself.