Come As You Are

In Mara Sandrock's works, the traditional materials of painting are stripped of their
are freed from their usual functions. Away from creative norms, they lead an exciting life of their own:

They proliferate and grow, layer, curl and clench, expand and contract.
The seemingly corporeal material is subjected to a constant process of fine
of subtle, sometimes uncontrollable changes.

With her hybrid pictorial objects and installations, the artist follows the paths of liberated painterly material. Her focus is on the investigation of pictorial surfaces. Mara Sandrock breaks with the traditional and one-sided use of the flat surface as a setting for illusionistic pictorial events. In a literally
she explores the properties and possibilities of material surfaces in a literally
of material pictorial surfaces.

Processed fabrics cover boxes and stretcher frames of various formats,
leaving their narrow confines and hanging from walls and ceilings.
Elsewhere, the paintings retreat beneath their surface.
In the sense of revealing concealment, skins stretch,
sometimes stretched to bursting point, sometimes limp and sunken, stretch over a vague background that can only be guessed at and made out in its obscurity.

The pictorial surface becomes an actor that simultaneously opens and closes, delimits and connects. If one explores Mara Sandrock's detailed works with a groping gaze, one encounters the unknown. Woven into relief structures and nesting behind protective layers, it seems strangely close and familiar.

- Cara Venzke -

part of OSTLichter Festival