Elza Sile: Luxury Goods

We are proud to present the third solo exhibition with Latvian-born, Zurich-based artist Elza Sile. Her new body work reflects the complexity of the current world, its underlying thoughts and ideas, and the blurring of the modern world in all directions, its inexplicability. It is a work of art that reflects the structure of the outside world, outwardly rational and firm, but at a deeper level fragile and impermanent. Materiality interests Sile both as a physical, permanently existing being that the artist "animates", giving it the status of an artistic artefact, and also through its qualities that resist artistry and the nobility of form. The whiteness of the plaster evokes the apparent timelessness of ancient art, while also embodying qualities that suggest a sterile, impersonal, distanced environment. The archaic alternates with the futuristic. The territory of Elza Sile's work is the space between association (or the viewer's reaction), cultural meaning, the artist's self-interpretation and the visual form of a feeling or idea, or the relative object of representation.

The exhibition titled "Luxury Goods" makes the mood oscillate between the serious and the amusing, the down-to-earth and the airy, much like the artist's material choices. This ambivalence also drives the idea of the exhibition towards a landscape of destruction, of what will be left after environmental catastrophe and human decay. The works resemble elemental accumulations of objects that are not really suitable for the human body, art without a viewer and without an author.

Elza Sile's works are characterised by elements that belong to painting (brushstroke, colour, bodily gestures), but the way they are used is closer to architecture, recalling the fact that the artist grew up in a family and environment of architects. However, the combination of these elements and the final result do not resemble an architectural model, but return to a composition similar to a Pointillist image, made up of spatialised brushstrokes, paint as substance and matter. The post-medial in the art of Sile is not synthesising, combining the qualities of different artistic media, but rather splitting these qualities, breaking them into separate units. Text by Santa Hirša (art critic and historian)