Opening
Wednesday, June 24
from 6–9PM

On View
June 24 – August 08 2026

Wednesday – Saturday
Noon – 5PM

Marta
3021 Rowena Ave.
Los Angeles, CA 90039

Marta is pleased to announce a dual exhibition of new work by Copenhagen-based artist Bonnie Hvillum of Natural Material Studio and Berkeley-based artist Rafi Ajl. Co-existing in the gallery’s main exhibition space, these dialoguing bodies of work from Hvillum and Ajl—entitled Tale of the Gatherer and Pressure Crack Vessels, respectively—extend from mutual practices defined by acts of process, development, and investigation... of the layers that extend over one another into a collaboration between Artist and Material.

Working across various planes and functions, Hvillum constructs a spatial narrative that derives from the container—the form-giver to both internal and external experience. Conceived as stages of a journey, visitors pass in and out of these areas as a gatherer would; a figure guided by the principles of earth-bound collation and navigation. It is an intuitive role: one that supports the agency of materials by collecting them rather than subjugating them through traditional methods of harvest. The vessel, which allows for the conveyance of materials from their site of origin, is the repository for such collaboration; the primordial “tool,” as Ursula K. Le Guin proposes in her essay (The Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction, 1989), “that brings energy home.”

Hvillum, who visited Los Angeles in the winter of 2025 on a research trip to gather native and naturalized materials from the city and its environs, derives form from this dialogue, building shapes through the layering of bio-resins and -textiles that suspend bark, clay, soil, and eucalyptus from L.A. County in their semi-transparent compositions. Each vessel, light, seat, and suspended work is an extension of the land and the spaces where gathering occurs—the center point of the artist’s source material and attendant modes of creation. Rectilinear sections of fabric reference the format of paintings while expressing the totality of sculpture, existing in all angles and perspectives. Light works descend into the exhibition space, the meeting point between the instinctive and the industrial; the embodied and the scientific, illuminating the vessels positioned on the floor: open containers prepared to hold what we ask them to carry.

Working within a kindred framework to Hvillum’s, each of Ajl’s vessels emerges from an elemental gesture—the quick roll of a slab of molten glass; or thick wax, then cast in aluminum and plated. The materials push and pull, resist and acquiesce to the act of form-making, allowing process to operate as a sculptural force. They exist, as Félix Guattari and Gilles Deleuze write (A Thousand Plateaus, 1980), as “a single, uninterrupted sentence [...] a flow of walking with pauses, straggling, and forward rushes.” Their physicality is a continuous state of becoming—a spectrum that holds both generative idea and outermost completion and positions the object as event, seen from its living middle.

Displayed in a classical format—discrete works on tall plinths á la stone busts—each of Ajl’s vessels becomes an icon of itself. The nickel-plated aluminum, more metal than metal, declares its materiality as a Platonic ideal; archetypal and fundamentally unknowable. A poetry extends from the artist’s forms, their fissures, folds, and vitric distortions engendering a curiosity about the nature of objects and the energy they gather over time. This state of existence, what German philosopher and cultural critic Walter Benjamin termed the concept of “object aura,” trains our attention to time as a dimension through which we experience art objects, an essence that absorbs and dispenses as our relationship to these works evolve.

In both Hvillum and Ajl’s hands, a system of interaction and response plays out: materials succumb to influence but maintain their integrity, preserving the will that allows them to transform and arrange as their nature allows and as the artists, in their terrestrial explorations, facilitate.

Natural Material Studio is an award-winning studio for art, design and research. Founded in 2019 by Bonnie Hvillum, the studio transforms natural and discarded resources into biomaterials, sculptures, objects, and environments that merge functionality, artistry, and circularity. Hvillum and Natural Material Studio has exhibited internationally and been part of exhibitions at Copenhagen Contemporary, Design Museum Denmark, Étages Projects, Alcova Miami, and the Danish Architecture Centre. Notable clients and collaborators include Noma, Snøhetta, Frama, Gehl Architects, Office Kim Lenschow, Dinesen, Adidas, Calvin Klein, Typology, and Leeds University. The studio’s work has been profiled in Dezeen, Frame Magazine, IGNANT, Financial Times, Azure Magazine, and Plural Magazine. Tale of the Gatherer is the artist’s first solo exhibition at and with Marta.

Rafi Ajl is a Berkeley-based artist who is obsessed with form and process. He is driven by the possibilities of materiality and reverence for the pressures of the creative process, creating work that explores the rawness of material and pushes it past its limits. He believes there is an infinite world in every object and looks to find the edges and breaking points to pull the unexpected within. With an approach rooted in post-structuralist theory, he believes that process is never terminal, but rather boundless and full of play. Ajl holds an MFA in Design from the California College of the Arts. He has shown work with Aditions, Works in Progress, The Jones Institute, Heath San Francisco, The Future Perfect, and Pallas Gallery. His work has been profiled in Sight Unseen, Dwell, San Francisco Chronicle, Design Milk, Architectural Digest, and Elle Decor, among others. Pressure Crack Vessels is the artist’s first presentation at and with Marta.