Marble Riddles

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"Marble Riddles" art exhibition at the Old Carpet Factory
Holly Biörklund and Esteban Fuentes de Maria

22.06.2025 - 27.06.2025

The exhibition presented newly commissioned marble pieces, each engaging in a dialogue between minerality and mystery. Through these works, the artists explore the inherent dualities of marble, its historical weight and contemporary resonance, inviting viewers into a space where stone becomes a canvas for riddles both ancient and new.

The exhibition was organized with a generous support from Serpetinis.

If stone could speak, what riddles would it reveal?

Each artwork in this exhibition holds a riddle, its content intrinsically mystified. Expressed through metaphor and allegory, not necessarily meant to be decoded, but to be drawn into. The primary layer is the metamorphic material itself, shaped by pressure, heat, and time, dense with geological memory. The second layer is the artist’s unique imprint: intuitive, reflective, and fleeting. Yet, the riddle truly comes alive within the viewer’s subjective apprehension. Marble Riddles drifts between matter and myth, object and enigma, summoning sensitive ingenuity.

Marble Riddles brings together British artist Holly Biörklund and Mexican artist Esteban Fuentes de María in an intimate conversation through fifteen stone paintings. Sharing a lineage in mural painting, a tradition rooted in human migration, cultural exchange, and evolving mythologies. Once ceremonial or spiritual, murals connect them to prehistoric rock art, often monumental and carrying the weight of walls; in Marble Riddles, Biörklund and Fuentes de María turn inward, distilling mural composition into hand-held precious fragments, like the minute scale frescoes once discovered on Hydra, Greece.

The archetypal “noble stone” functions here as both canvas and conceptual armature for their respective approaches; Biöklund and Fuentes de Maria paint the stone with image and rhythm, repurposing leftovers that hover between relic and rêverie, mythology, and symbology.

Biörklund’s iconography whispers of natural spirits and forgotten folklores. Her delicate, layered imagery seems to emerge from the stone itself, suggesting alchemy between imagination and mineral memory, introducing precious talismans intentionally powerful.

Fuentes de María’s Hellenic connoted labyrinths, protective eyes, and Cycladic elements are part of his larger surrealist cosmology, shaped by his deep engagement with myth, history, nature and space. As Michelangelo famously said, for him, the marble already holds the image; the artist merely reveals it.

While each artist maintains a distinct visual anthem, their works, as minute fresco details, invite contemplative, almost up-close scrutiny. Placed within a setting that is part studiolo, part shrine, marmaron becomes eloquent, giving new life to the discarded that might otherwise remain obsolete.

If the riddle, like the fragments, once belonged to a larger mythopoetic frame, might it now influence the creation of one’s personal mythology?

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