Sandra Strēle graduated in 2016 from the Art Academy of Latvia, acquiring her Master's degree at the Department of Painting, also she had spent one semester as part of a student exchange programme at the Royal Academy of Fine Arts in Antwerp. She received the visual arts scholarship of the Boris and Ināra Teterev Foundation in 2012, the Brederlo von Sengbusch Art Prize in 2014, the SEB Banka scholarship in painting in 2016, the prestigious grant from The Elizabeth Greenshields Foundation in Canada (2019, 2021) and Young Painter Prize in 2019. Sandra Strēle has held a number of solo exhibitions, participated in group exhibitions and artist residences in Italy, Belarus, Estonia, Lithuania, Norway, India, Belgium, Germany, France and elsewhere.
Sandra Strēle has defended Professional Doctor’s Degree in Arts in 2024.
ARTIST STATEMENT
For as long as I can remember, I have always had the desire to tell stories. For several hours every night, my pa invented tales, thus developing my passion for creating different fictitious, illusory subworlds. Every story I create now is a continuation of the previous one - like a series in which its protagonists do not age, but experience new transformations. They are affected by time, predictions of the future, or invented future scenarios, as well as reflection and devotion to memories of the past.
In my creative work, I create large-scale installations based on classic painting - a series of paintings that, in chronological order, advance from one story to another. I focus on creating and interpreting secluded, alienated, sometimes lonely places, their architecture, and fictitious everyday scenes, offering the viewer the role of an observer. The painted places and landscapes in each series of paintings preserve some of their attributes from the previous one and simultaneously offer the viewer to perceive the changes and transformations that have occurred. In painting, I try to introduce cinema aesthetics, where frame replaces frame. In my work, painting replaces painting, and they are all subject to a single time system, which is simultaneously seemingly real and veritable, but at the same time abstract. Building on the idea of a holographic universe, I try to merge the planes of the past, present, and future, but at the same time offer the viewer small edges of reality that for a moment can be read off these points of overlap. There is always a story or even an infinite set of stories among the serial paintings. What fascinates me most in painting is this opportunity to create a large number of stories, stemming from one original narrative.
My large-scale installations, which are pursuing new ways of creating and developing narrative painting, could be considered examples of expanded painting. To achieve complete and distinct storylines that connect the installation's paintings, I create artist's books that contain small textual fragments whose narrative connects them to one of the paintings. Expanded painting as a field of contemporary painting research has been a source of attraction for me for a long time. Addition of three-dimensional objects to paintings, either depicting them in paintings or displaying them in the installation space, is a powerful method of narrating a story. Painting is a very emotionally saturated medium, and in my opinion, it is always important for the viewer to recognize something familiar in paintings. And reproducing painted objects or their replicas in a three-dimensional plane and incorporating them in a single exposition with paintings ensures it.
I attach great importance to the size of the paintings. That is why I usually create large-scale paintings that encourage the viewer to perceive painting as a physical experience. Painting is my emotional, mental, and physical work, as well as a process of physical and spiritual enjoyment, during which I must continually work, think, and care for my viewer.
