SOLO exhibition “overgrowth“, the rooster gallery, vilnius

In her work, Strēle draws on the tradition of landscape and architectural landscape. Her large-scale paintings and painting installations usually represent remote, alienated spaces, often surrounded by lush greenery. Strēle’s paintings are characterized by an unexpected structure and an original visual logic, which confuses the viewer’s gaze by the discrepancy of different scales, contrasts of precise, rational, free and surreal shapes, complicated perspectives, and manifold intersections of spaces and planes. The narrative of this exhibition focuses on overgrowth – an inevitable process, a proof of nature’s invincibility, a constant reminder of life’s subjection to time, unavoidable changes and the unknown. The one that hides behind the wild thickets or is subject to an unpredictable fate that will turn existing things and places into unreachable and obscure objects in the near or distant future. The plants that take over man-made and now abandoned places are like testimonies of something that is in the past and at the same time emerging, something that was once known, but is currently overgrowing to be rediscovered.

The narratives of Strēle’s art unfold in series. One painting follows another, and all of them are controlled by time, which seems both real and abstract all at once, shifting back and forth between the reflections and memories of the past and the imaginary scenarios of the future, often marked by the permeating mood of melancholy and nostalgia. Works included in this exhibition are a part of the series “Exhibitions that never happened”, which reflects on various aspects of the painter’s life, focusing on the flow of time. Impenetrable overgrown forest, overgrown pool, overgrown road and stairs, overgrown artist’s studio. All these motifs raise the question: what is this mysterious event that has changed the meaning of these places and spaces? And who is the observer?

Text: The Rooster Gallery