Doppelboden - Sandra Strēle

About

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 acrylic paintings made over the last three years, marking the first solo exhibition of her work outside the Baltics.

The pandemic gave Strēle pause to reflect on artisthood and the role of art. Painting "exhibitions that never happened," she 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 works, she considers painting's relation to the digital and the social, and being a woman artist, applying her penchant for intertwined storytelling in rich, layered narratives full of twists, contradictions, and
hidden references.

Formulating a highly individual pictorial response to the homogenizing digital regime, Strēle's excentric interiors 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." The resulting scintillating ambivalence conveys the Doppelbodigkeit referred to in the exhibition's title, a term in German both referring to a hidden architectonic compartment, and a tricky, layered ambiguity.