MUTTERBODEN

An exhibition of paintings and assemblages by Sarah Arriagada and Silvia von Pock

The Stone Space, 6 Church Lane, London E11 1HG

July 21 to August 14, 2016

Opening reception: July 21, 2016, 6.30-8.30 pm

Gallery hours: Thursday and Friday 2-6pm, Saturday 10-5pm, and Sunday 12-4pm

Mutterboden brings together German painters Sarah Arriagada and Silvia von Pock and their shared interest in a playful, material and process-based approach to image making. Both artists take everyday household materials as their starting point, from cheerful textiles to discarded packaging and plastics, and create paintings that explore their visual, tactile and structural possibilities.

The German word Mutterboden (mother soil: engl. top soil) refers to the earth, the medium in which things germinate and flourish. In the context of this show it alludes to the mass of ‘stuff’, the visually fertile layers of cheap, colourful debris that surround us and from which these art works grow. Both artists have a love of textures and an openness to haptic discoveries that are allowed to shape their work, sometimes taking them outside the framework of canvas and stretcher and beyond the flat plane. But Arriagada and von Pock’s contrasting strategies produce paintings that throw each other into sharp relief.

Substituting domestic textiles for canvas, Arriagada continually layers and strips back paint, sometimes reversing the stretcher as she seeks a purified, distilled, image in the face of colourful excess. Von Pock’s impulse is to collage and encrust, building layers and massing materials until new visual effects are found in works that are structurally self-supporting. Shown together for the first time at The Stone Space, Arriagada and von Pock’s works generate a lively dialogue with and about seemingly worthless materials and what they offer the restless and resourceful eye.

ABOUT THE ARTISTS

Silvia von Pock revels in the wealth of cheap, disposable materials that surround us, using them to make multi-media paintings that reveal the visual power of everyday detritus. Her work is driven by a playful responsiveness to the colour and structural possibilities of found plastics, discarded packaging and pound shop treasures, which she shapes into works that take painting beyond the flat plane.

Broken rubber bands, throbbing with synthetic pigment, are stitched into luxuriant fringes, woven through mesh or bunched and swagged to form a tangled air orchid. Plastic drinking straws are glued into self-supporting structures, collaged to build rippled layers of colour or bristle from painted surfaces like coral formations. Von Pock masses these materials in large quantities until she finds a tipping point where a new quality or effect emerges.

The natural and the artificial collide in works where oddly organic appearances grow from accumulations of synthetic materials. Latex puddles form congealed rock pools, marshmallows float in gungy slicks of paint, and garishly coloured modelling clay oozes brightly coloured growths like toxic confectionery.

Whilst von Pock describes herself as a critical consumer, her work communicates a restless excitement at the inexhaustible visual possibilities of household rubbish and throwaway tat. Alive with surprising textures and discoveries, these works continually resist our perceptions of debased ‘stuff’.

Silvia von Pock studied fine art in Bremen and Berlin. She has curated and exhibited widely in Germany and lives and works in Hamburg. oliviavonpock.de

Sarah Arriagada’s works exude a light, playful quality and a joyful sense of the power that painting has to hold conflicting impulses in a momentary state of balance. Drawing on her interest in the fetishization of domestic interiors, Arriagada combines cheap textiles with both process and gestural painting techniques to produce works that explore the boundaries between fine art and decoration, ‘taste’ and kitsch, the precious and the banal.

Taking the everyday as her starting point Arriagada paints directly onto unprimed canvas or flimsy fabrics such as gingham, allowing elements of chance to shape the continual reworking of each canvas until she arrives at a point of visual clarity. In an almost ritualised process, she repeatedly applies and scrapes back layers of oil and acrylic to establish a grid or patterned ground against which organic shapes flourish in naïve, expressive strokes.

Arriagada’s actions seem both tentative and bold, awkward and assured as she reverses a canvas and reworks it in chalks and pastels, stencils through lace or blocks out and then exposes the tacky floral print onto which thick colour fields have been applied. The resulting paintings with their fluid, dynamic surfaces invite active looking and open up intimate and elusive spaces, rich in colour, texture and nostalgic association.

Sarah Arriagada was born in Hamburg, studied fine art in Berlin and has exhibited in France, Germany and the UK. She lives and works in London. saraharriagada.com