Artist Reception: Saturday, September 6, from 5–7pm
Municipal Bonds is pleased to present Reflections, Zaida Oenema's third solo exhibition with the gallery, on view September 6 through October 25, 2025. In this new body of work, the Dutch–Finnish artist distills fleeting encounters with the natural world into precise, architectonic compositions. The exhibition brings together hand-sawn wood forms layered with the artist's paper pulp and pigments, alongside paper reliefs cut with a scalpel or burned with a soldering iron. Across these works, she engages with the underlying proportions, divisions, and rhythms of environmental phenomena, translating them into compositions at once exacting and alive.
Beneath Oenema's technical rigor lies a philosophical position. Her practice affirms beauty, stillness, and care in a time of instability—grounded in what she calls "our spiritual duty to cherish the world around us." Hope, for her, is an active state, renewed moment by moment, like light moving anew across a surface. In Reflections, she unites invention with the physicality of materials and the shaping influence of nature, sustaining a practice where making and contemplation are inseparable.
The multipart work Reflections anchors the exhibition's title and conceptual core. Comprising a diptych, two horizontal panels are divided into four vertical parts; together they mirror one another, reimagining mountains on a still lake. This configuration, which she likens to looking through a window, recalls devices in iconography and historical painting that mark thresholds—entries into another realm—where reflection is both mirror and passage. The image is drawn from memory, based on sketches the artist made during hiking trips in Germany and Switzerland. The work carries the kind of perspective found on a mountain summit: an expanded sense of scale paired with a moment of repose, where distance sharpens one's sense of place.
In Echoes, elliptical forms are defined by openings that let light pass through, shifting patterns as one moves in relation to the piece. The structure draws on the Dutch concept of tussenruimte—the "space between"—where form and interval hold equal weight. Light and shadow play across the surface in active apertures, shaped by both material presence and absence. Like an echo, the patterns return altered, always in motion. Oenema approaches this dynamic with precision, shaping a balance between material presence and optical change.
Burnings (Variation X) takes a more elemental approach. Four diagonals generate a system of near-infinite permutations, each balancing scale, angle, and surface treatment. Burning acts as both mark and incision, leaving edges that read as line and depth. Within these parameters, the variations multiply, sustaining a quiet tension between order and transformation. The modular composition extends into an accompanying card game, offering visitors a way to reconfigure the work's essential elements—an expression of Oenema's interest in rule-bound systems that invite play.
This body of work signals a shift in Oenema's practice—from the sealed clarity of resin to surfaces that are tactile, light-responsive, and visibly shaped by time. It also marks a return to drawing, the foundation of her process. Before cutting and burning paper, Oenema often made rapid pencil sketches of landscapes—records that became catalysts for invention. In these works, nature is not a subject to depict but a guiding force, a way to clarify thought, navigate complexity, and ground form in lived perception.
Throughout, Oenema works with sequence, balance, and measure, principles that give her compositions clarity and structure. Yet the works are never static; they carry motion and discovery through process. Patterns take shape through currents of flow as well as moments of control. For Oenema, nature is a companion in thought, its repetitions and divisions offering a language of guidance. In Reflections, this orientation gathers force, sustaining a practice where making becomes a form of inquiry and devotion.
