Deborah Schamoni

Margot Samel is pleased to announce Trauerspiele, a solo exhibition of new works by Mariann Metsis (b. 1991, Tallinn, Estonia). This marks the artist’s first solo exhibition with the gallery and in the U.S.

“What if an actor could do it for you? Isn’t that why they are called actors? They act for you.” —Anne Carson

Trauerspiel—a German term for Baroque tragic drama that directly translates to “mourning play”—encapsulates the interdependence of grief and performance. This exchange between artifice and emotional upheaval serves as the foundation for a new series of oil paintings, all produced specifically for the space.

The paintings are organized as fragmented Greek theater: episodic and unresolved. An actor playing a schoolmistress stands before illegible scribbles on a chalkboard, highlighting the didactic structure of the show. A black poodle play-bows, asking, “Do you want to play with me?” Metsis’ recurring motifs—actors, performing dogs, circus seals, and theater binoculars—appear again in Trauerspiele, examined from shifting perspectives and worked through until exhausted.

Isabelle Huppert, often serving as Metsis’ muse, appears here as
Jeanne de Bucher, her chalked face echoing L’Inconnue de la Seine—the frequently reproduced plaster cast of an unidentified woman pulled from the River Seine in the late 19th century. A haunting presence, L’Inconnue’s death mask adorned the walls of Parisian high society, embodying the unknowable specter of grief.

The orchestration of this play remains enigmatic; figures possess a palimpsestic quality, repeatedly wiped away and redrawn, mirroring the “work of mourning”—a psychic process that involves the reshuffling, rearranging, and reworking of the lost object across its many representations, with the psyche gradually detaching. A successful working through of mourning isn’t about getting over the loss, but finding a way of integrating it into one’s life.

Built on acidic grounds, the painting’s past infects its future with a miasmatic quality. Earlier gestures seep through newer ones, infecting the image as history infects the present. The future of the painting becomes haunted by its own making and through these repeated marks and erasures, the characters gain a form of belated mastery. The canvas, like a stage, becomes a frame for emotional resonance, transforming loss into melodrama. Loss, be it death, divorce, estrangement, displacement, or betrayal, demands symbolic registration; if a loss is not symbolized, it returns to haunt or manifests as pathology.

In 1960, Norwegian toy manufacturer Åsmund Lærdal used L’Inconnue’s face, chosen for its blankness, to design Resusci Anne, a resuscitation training mannequin. Unlike L’Inconnue, however, Resusci Anne is saved only to die in perpetuity. Metsis’ figures undergo a similar fate, performing as Melpomene; they are condemned to re-enactment, trapped in a loop of imagined futures and burdened pasts.

Text: Lowe Poulter
Photos: Margot Samel, New York