Lullaby, Installation View

Management is pleased to present Lullaby, Marlon Kroll’s first solo exhibition with the gallery and his first in New York since 2021. Through a practice that filters sculpture, drawing, and found ephemera, Kroll attempts to understand spiritual and cultural phenomena through ideas in science and folklore, and the body’s shifting position therein. What follows are his own thoughts about the exhibition.

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As I write this, at the crest of the year, the show exists as little more than a feeling, like a ghost whispering in my ear. A feeling of coincidences and similarities, warmth, correspondences, as tangible and solid as a snake’s moult.

Drawing helps me understand the world and my place in it. Every work begins unplanned, a collection of senseless marks leaning towards something. That’s the thing though, there’s meaning everywhere, and in everything a reflection.

When I turned 30, I started to contend with the truth of things in a new way. I was no longer a child but ever my parents' son, contrarily an unbeliever but in posture alone. In their way they were proud but still wished I’d become more like them; my mom was a psychic and my dad a musician. But I guess we look for meaning in different ways. I found my ecstasy in other things. Awe in the ways things are connected, to me a reflection of God embodied around me. Immanence.

When I began thinking about this show, I thought about the winter and my childhood, the cold house, the wood stove my mother tended all day and smoked like a literal chimney into. Thinking back to the joys of those times, my mother and the stove dissolve into one, an abstraction of all the love, light and warmth in the world. A glowing figure in the cold.

These days I find myself more sentimental than I’d thought I’d ever be.

As 2023 unfurled, my mind drifted to radiators and furnaces, the wave spectrum, instruments and sound, holy minimalism, communication. I thought of how a radiator looks like a spine, and imagined the system of warm pipes running through a house as the scaffold and circulatory system of a house-being, recalling William Blake’s 4th-dimensional body-city of Golgonooza and its forge and furnaces, the “organs of man”, Bowlahoola, which burn in its centre. I thought about how warmth is yellow and color a wave and that maybe both can transmit a message to the stars, that maybe my drawings are little antennas and my sculptures a beacon, that both are little spirit portals. I thought about the overlooked fact that a musical organ shares its name with what's inside of us and how its bellows, like lungs, make it breathe and sing and if the organ were a fireplace, stoke its flame. How music makes me warm, how the color yellow is somehow my mother, and how by its resemblance in design to our biology an organ is basically just a person, just breathing and vocalising in different tones.

I think about how certain objects are like time machines, how different things connect you to the past. Whenever I touch an instrument, I think of my father and whenever I see a fireplace, my mother; I think my practice reflects a way of reaching into the past. For a long time, my drawings were a little incomprehensible to me. I would search for a logic when making them, and I felt I had one. I’ve come to understand them as 3-dimensional shadows of a 4th-dimensional object, something indecipherable to us in its true form. Maybe that’s the reason ghosts or spirits aren’t visible, or that the apparitions we occasionally spot are just the shadow of a higher dimension being. There are limits of perception. 

My mother always said she traveled dimensions. It's comforting to think that she’s in another one now, that she's happier wherever she'd traveled to. The question is then, how can I reach her? 

Ultimately I think my practice is about correspondence, and different facets of my work are like little spells with which to reach certain people. But also correspondence in the sense of magical correspondence, the idea that one can influence something based on its relationship or resemblance to another thing. Coincidentally enough, another thing my mother practiced was magic. Isn’t art just a form of magic? 

— Marlon Kroll, December 23, 2023

Marlon Kroll (b. 1992 in Hamburg, Germany) is a Montreal-based artist interested in perception, infinity, and the supernatural. The child of a psychic and a musician, his work articulates questions around embodiment, the nature of reality, and the construction of truth. Recent solo and institutional exhibitions include Fireflies, Eli Kerr, Montreal; Revelation, Fondrie Darling, Montreal, 2023; Receiver, Acapella, Naples, Italy; Nesting, Foundation Phi, Montreal, 2022; A Chronique Fear, Marvin Gardens, Queens, New York, 2021; Rifts, hovels, a sighing tide, Afternoon Projects, Vancouver, 2021; La Machine Qui Enseignait Des Airs Aux Oiseaux, Musée d’art Contemporain de Montreal, 2020; Red Sky at Morning, Interstate Projects, Brooklyn, New York, 2019; Sunrise It Crystallize, Parisian Laundry/Bradley Ertaskiran, Montreal, 2019. Kroll was awarded the William and Meredith Saunderson Prize for Emerging Artists in 2020. His work is in numerous public and private collections, including the Museum of Contemporary Art (MAC) in Montreal, CDPQ Collection, Fidelity Investments Collection, and Foundation Giverny Collection.