From February 3, 2023, Sandra Strēle's personal exhibition “NENOTIKUŠĀS IZSTĀDES: BRIKŠŅI” will be on display in the Great Hall of the exhibition hall "Riga Art Space". The exhibition will be open to visitors until March 19.
Sandra Strēle's new solo exhibition “NENOTIKUŠĀS IZSTĀDES: BRIKŠŅI” consists of a cycle of twenty-five monumental paintings. Sandra is an artist of the new generation, for whom large format is not a happy coincidence, but a stable, recognizable handwriting. Her paintings are a combination of a stable nervous system, a persistent work mode (most of the compositions exhibited in the exhibition were painted during 2022), carefully balanced form and content.
Conditionally, Sandra could be placed in the field of landscape painting, the richest genre in Latvian painting traditions that is highly loved by the audience. The very title of the exhibition, which contains the most typical characteristic of the Latvian landscape, leads to this: brushwood - the grayish interweaving of small, delicate bushes and rocks. However, Sandra tackles the landscape in her own way, demonstrating the ability to make self-sufficiently decorative, eye-pleasing paintings that "doesn't rip and tear" into a larger, intellectually balanced system, where the smooth painted acrylic surfaces hold together many painted elements (mushrooms, matryoshkas, garden gnomes, tennis courts and unfinished buildings) and guides the viewer on a long journey from composition to composition. Sandra has repeatedly emphasized in her interviews that her understanding of paintings can be most accurately described by the concepts "story, storytelling, seriality" - where the story continues from one series of paintings to the next, where "something" happens behind the paintings or between the paintings. "Painting is the slowest of all cinemas" - this is how Sandra herself has described her storytelling method in painting.
Sandra Strēle was born in 1991. In 2016, she graduated from the Latvian Art Academy with a master's degree in the department of painting, and also spent one semester at the Royal Academy of Fine Arts in Antwerp as part of the student exchange program. Sandra has received a visual arts scholarship from the Boris and Inara Teterev Foundation (2012), the Brederlo von Sengbush Art Award (2014), a painting scholarship from SEB Bank (2016), prestigious scholarships from the "The Elizabeth Greenshields" foundation in Canada (2019, 2021), the Young Painter prize (2019) and the PIAB prize at the International Barcelona Contemporary Art Fair in Spain (2022). Sandra Strēle has held several personal exhibitions, participated in group exhibitions and artist residencies in Italy, Norway, India, Belgium, Germany, France and elsewhere. Currently, the artist is studying in the professional doctoral study program of the Latvian Academy of Arts.
The artist is collaborating with the Riga Art Space for the second time - in 2019, Strēle's personal exhibition NOSTAĻĢIJA took place in the Great Hall of the exhibition hall.
The exhibition is organized by the exhibition hall of the Association of Culture Institutions of the Riga Municipality "Rigas Art Space", supported by the Riga City Council, the State Cultural Capital Fund and Kokmuiža.