Opening reception on Tuesday, August 9^th, from 4 to 8 pm.

SomoS is pleased to present Latvian painter Sandra Strēle’s solo exhibition Doppelboden. Initially planned in the context of a SomoS residency awarded to Strēle as part of the 2019 Young Painter Prize honoring the work of young painters from the Baltic States, the show fell victim to Berlin’s harsh pandemic restrictions. It presents large-scale figurative acrylic paintings made over the last three years, marking the first solo exhibition of her work outside the Baltics.

Pandemic and lockdown gave Strēle pause to reflect on artisthood and the role of art. Painting “exhibitions that never happened,” she whimsically depicts her work in large museum halls or art collections hung in spacious nostalgic living rooms in a sometimes almost comix-like style. In other artworks, she considers painting’s relation to the digital and the social; being a woman artist; and the female body; applying her penchant for intertwined storytelling in rich, layered narratives full of intriguing twists and hidden references.

Besides expressing a flight of fancy during lockdown, Strēle’s interiors could be read as a satiric comment on the online ways artists are trying to prove their work’s suitability to the tastes of the rich by montaging their work in generic fictitious luxurious interiors and grand virtual collection rooms.

Developing an individual pictorial response to the homogenizing digital regime, Strēle’s paintings contain endless contradictions and illogicalities that keep our gaze and mind on edge, “breaking down the border between what is clearly visible and what the painting is trying to say.” Making us question what we think to see, conflating the borders between inside and out; object and representation, the resulting scintillating ambivalence conveys the Doppelbodigkeit referred to in the exhibition’s title, a term in German referring to both a hidden architectonic compartment, as well as a tricky, layered ambiguity.

About Sandra Strēle

Sandra Strēle is a Latvian painter, who graduated from the Art Academy of Latvia in 2016. Over the years, her work was presented in numerous solo and group exhibitions in countries such as Italy, Belarus, Estonia, Lithuania, Norway, India, Belgium, Germany, and France. She was awarded the Boris and Ināra Teterev Foundation visual arts scholarship in 2012, the Brederlo von Sengbusch Art Prize in 2014, the SEB Banka scholarship in painting in 2016, The Elizabeth Greenshields Foundation grant, and the Young Painter Prize in 2019.

About the Young Painter Prize

Focused solely on Baltic painters under 30 years, the “Young Painter Prize,” awarded since 2009, has over the years become an important platform for young artists from Lithuania, Latvia, and Estonia. The initiative presents the most promising painters of the younger generation and creates an opportunity for public access to dynamic new art. Moreover, it aids its target audience in both Lithuania and abroad – art collectors, managers, and curators – in discovering new talent from the region.

Details

Opening reception on Tuesday, August 9^th, from 4 to 8 pm

Open Wednesday, August 10^th – Saturday, August 20^th, 2 – 7 pm, and by appointment. Closed on Mondays and Sundays

SomoS, Kottbusser Damm 95, 1.0G, 10967 Berlin (U8 – Schönleinstraße)

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