Honesty as method

Some artists must be met in person before you can write about them. Not to gather information, but to understand the "feel" of the air in their studio. Marielle Schram is one such artist. This article grew out of a conversation; the rest of the work spoke for itself.

Text by Yves Joris, 2026 (Dutch text below/nederlandse tekst hieronder)

The bronze that waits

She starts with the bronze. Or rather, she starts with what bronze is teaching her about herself. A small sculpture—a favourite from a series she’s been working on for a while—is currently being cast in wax in Spain, at the studio of a sculptor near Schram's "home from home" in Girona. She is learning the ropes: the casting, the finishing, the entire painstaking process that precedes the final material. "It's so much work", she says, "A mammoth task." She laughs—not unhappily, but with the recognition of someone who has just understood why most sculptors outsource this stage. "The connection with the material," she continues, "that’s the fun part. The rest is a learning curve."

It is a good start to our conversation. Not because it is a revelation, but because it strikes exactly the right distance: she is in the middle of something, not on top of it. She isn't explaining; she’s thinking out loud. This, it turns out, is how Marielle Schram always works—within the work, not alongside it.

New York, Mexico City, London

Schram studied at Tilburg Academy in the 1980s: a five-year degree in drawing and painting. She then began teaching, but not for long; life had other plans. New York for a while. Then Mexico City for three years. Then London, where she stayed—for her husband’s work, she says, but also because she lingered in the way one lingers in places that allow you to exist. She drew and painted constantly. She taught on the side. She was a member of artist collectives, spent years in a co-operative running its own gallery space, and exhibited in open calls across London.

The British circuit shaped her attitude towards language and titles. In the Netherlands, she had been an "untitled" artist for years—no title, just the work. In London, she was told that "Untitled" wasn't an invitation to look. She began giving works titles, discovering she could keep them open to multiple interpretations, and eventually grew fond of the practice. Now, she feels a well-chosen title opens something up rather than closing it off. Yet the reflex to remain silent, to let the work speak for itself without the mediation of words, remains.

Paint that demands something else

Painting is her first love. She says this without hesitation, and you can hear that it isn't a ranking but a fact about the materials themselves: for her, paint is so inherently expressive that abstract thinking thrives in it naturally. The texture of paint demands something different from pencil or clay; they each lose themselves in their own way.

Her drawings stand autonomously—they are not studies for paintings or a preliminary stage for something else. She always works on loose sheets, never in a sketchbook. She wants to be able to shift them around, lay them side by side, hang them together, and see the dialogue between works without a book dictating the order. Furthermore, because she consistently uses mixed media, she lacks the patience to wait for a sketchbook page to dry. That, she says sincerely, is actually a very practical consideration.

But the practical reason masks something deeper. The loose sheets also engage in a different relationship with incompleteness. They hang. They react to one another. They might disappear into a box for a year and then reemerge, kept just long enough to become "right"—or not. Some works find a second life in a collage; others vanish for good. She holds them up to the light until she knows what they are.

The woman at the window

The figure in her work is the kind that disappears if you look for too long.

One of her works on paper shows a seated form, half-dissolved into vertical black strokes—paint or charcoal, applied thickly and rhythmically, like tree trunks or trails of raindrops. The background is a page from a book: an English typeface, visible but illegible beneath the layers of paint and collage. The figure wears orange, a warm core glowing against all that black and beige, but the face has been obscured, replaced by a white void. She is there and she isn't. You are looking at someone who is either fading or emerging; the direction is not clear.

This ambiguity isn't a trick. It recalls Edvard Munch, whom Schram has admired since the eighties—the first exhibition of his she saw moved her to tears—but also the later work of Käthe Kollwitz, seen in the hunched, introspective posture of the body. And in the layering itself—the printed language beneath the image, the text that supports without being read—there are echoes of Anselm Kiefer: as if the image rises out of the language, or is slowly sinking back into it.

The series she created around the theme of "the woman at the window"—inspired by Munch, by the old tradition of Vermeer’s woman reading a letter, and by the threshold between the internal and external worlds—demonstrates how this works. She began with a single idea: a woman, lost in thought, hands in her lap, by the window. The movement of thoughts coming and going; the feeling of sometimes vanishing, or conversely, being intensely present. From that one starting point, the series grew. She worked on several canvases at once—because paint takes time to dry, and you need something else to do while you wait. She lost herself in the image. She didn't think: I’ll put her here and then she’ll fade to the left. She thought: the background is pushing forward, and I’m letting it. In this way—organically, without a compositional blueprint—works were created that can be read like a comic strip in two directions: the person disappearing into the colour, or the person emerging from it. Both stories are true.

She struggles with work that is too "bang", she exclaims—too singular, too quickly explained. She wants honesty in her work—that word recurs again and again in the conversation, like a professional credo—but for her, honesty does not mean a single fixed meaning. You can see something from two sides and still be honest. In her view. But once you are...

She doesn't finish the sentence. She doesn't need to.

Poor materials, free spirit

The sculptures are her newest discipline and the most free. In their use of materials, they are unmistakably related to Arte Povera—the 1960s Italian movement that made noble art from "poor" materials, breaking the hierarchy between raw ingredients and art objects by working with what was at hand: stone, wood, string, cloth, earth. For Schram, it’s wire, foil, tape, twine, linen, air-drying clay, lava, cork. Materials that cost nothing and demand everything. She combines them not to be cheap, but because these substances possess a level of honesty that more expensive materials sometimes lack. They say what they are.

There is a white figure standing on a rough stone. It isn't large—you could pick it up with one hand. It’s made of foil and tape, and the fold lines haven't been smoothed away: they sit in the surface like creases in a sheet of paper that was once something else. The head is slightly too large for the body. The legs are thin yet anchored. It stands—and that independent stance is no accident. She wants the figures to be able to stand on their own two feet, she says. Pick-up-able, put-down-able, portable. They must carry something without collapsing under the weight of it.

Behind the figure, on the wall, is a red sketch in pencil—another body, looser, more movement, more flesh. Not a study for the sculpture, not a preparation. Rather the opposite: the energy the sculpture gave off when it fell still. The red line is what remains when you try to fix something in place and it escapes anyway. Together—the white, solidified figure and its red, restless shadow—they say more about Schram’s method than any explanation could. One follows from the other. One is never finished without the other.

The stone beneath is not a pedestal. "Pedestal" has too many connotations, she says—elevating someone, creating distance. For her, the base is part of the sculpture. "It belongs. If it doesn't belong, I don't do it. Then it's just ground."

She never formally studied sculpture. This makes her free with such innocence that she can no longer achieve in painting and drawing. Her extensive education taught her when to stop—"five years of study to know when to stop," she says—but that knowledge is also a brake. With the sculptures, she doesn't know enough to be inhibited. She is only curious.

Starting over

In 2024, Schram returned to the Netherlands after more than thirty years. Breda is new to her as a city—the contacts, the galleries, the network she slowly built in London are not automatically present here. She has to start again. But she says this without bitterness. She says it like someone who knows the work is always there, and that the rest is a matter of patience.

In June 2026, she will hold her first Dutch solo exhibition at the Princenhaags Museum in Breda. For her, it is a "business card"—not in the commercial sense, but the literal one: this is who I am, this is how I work, this is what I have to say. She wants a text she can take to galleries she finds interesting. Not to pitch herself, but to be able to start the conversation.

The conversation, not the explanation. That distinction is a serious one for her.