MAUD MADSEN:
Combat Games

Madsen’s practice explores the spaces and activities of her childhood, reimagined with mature bodies, as a way of revisiting formative experiences with adult understanding. Through tightly-arranged compositions, Madsen plays with notions of control, escape, safety, and vulnerability in order to bring new perspectives to common experiences. As her practice has evolved, the work’s central character has begun to play an active role, exploring her agency and autonomy by assembling walls, castles and forts around herself. While the constructed world threatens to erode and break, Madsen underscores the significance of such humble and temporary transformations in understanding conceptions of sanctuary, however frail they may be.

In Combat Games, Madsen depicts the childhood game of Red Rover with four players, focusing on the struggle and violence present in a traditional space of play. Both identification and isolation are present in different ways, due to the dichotomy of the self and the Other through the implied interior and exterior of the human wall. This is palpable within the frame and the force of the two figures holding the runner back while also supporting her, their hands form a visibly fragile point near the center of the painting.

MAUD MADSEN (b. 1993, Edmonton, Alberta, Canada) currently lives and works in Brooklyn, NY. Madsen received her BFA from the University of Alberta and MFA from the New York Academy of Art. Recent solo exhibitions have been hosted by Half Gallery (New York, NY), FLAG Art Foundation (New York, NY), Marianne Boesky Gallery (New York, NY), Half Gallery (Los Angeles, CA), and 1969 Gallery (New York, NY). She has been a recipient of the Chubb Post-Graduate Fellowship at the New York Academy of Art, the Elizabeth Greenshields Foundation Grant, and the New York Foundation for the Arts’ Canadian Women Artists’ Award.