Sofia Silva and Sarah Loibl at Rolando Anselmi

Artists: Sofia Silva, Sarah Loibl

In collaboration with: Daniel Marzona

Venue: Rolando Anselmi, Berlin, Germany

Date: March 19 – May 28, 2021

Photography: all images copyright and courtesy of the artists and Rolando Anselmi, Berlin/Rome

Galerie Rolando Anselmi is pleased to announce the second project in collaboration with Daniel Marzona, with a two artists exhibition featuring works by Sarah Loibl (1987, Munich) and Sofia Silva (1990, Padua).

The show aims to create a dialogue between the two painters, comparing their personal understandings of the bi-dimensional surface, which acquires a new vital freshness far from schemes and technicalities.

Sofia Silva approaches painting by challenging the pictorial impulses that lead to representation, according to a process of continuous deconstruction of her own works. For the exhibition Silva presents a new series of paintings, Bitter Herbs, in which she expresses her need as a painter to reject the rules of current aesthetics, creating a parallel with the practice of abstinence from food and other needs of medieval women. For this new series the artist merges her pictorial practice with her interest in mysticism. Pursuing intuition, Sofia Silva’s experimentation aims to avoid the ghost of repetition or rhetoric.

In a similar way Sarah Loibl aims to keep her works open and resists the dictates of academic production, emphasizing both the making and the perceptive process of her works. In Loibl’s works presence and movement take a central role by the use of semi-transparent materials in which the perceptual logic is subverted. In her recent paintings questions about closeness or the openness of the painting’s surfaces gain prominence and are tied to quasi figurative depictions of faces. These “faces” sometimes dissolve into pure emanations of light and color – similar to phenomena we can discern when looking at a sky or seascape of certain paintings by Turner and others.

Both artists approach their works by understanding the pictorial medium as not limited to predefined schemes. Working within a space of cross-reference between painting, drawing and collage, they address the intimate and mundane sphere of everyday experience.

Sofia Silva & Sarah Loibl, 2021, installation view at Galerie Rolando Anselmi, in collaboration with Daniel Marzona, © Riccardo Malberti

Sofia Silva, Bitter Herbs (Lanugo), 2021, Acrylic, collage, embroidery fabric, glass paint, pastel, oil pastel and wool on oilcloth, 165 x 120 cm, © Riccardo Malberti

Sofia Silva, Bitter Herbs (Santa Pazza), 2021, Acrylic, collage, gesso, oil, pastel and organza on cotton, 110 x 80 cm, © Riccardo Malberti

Sofia Silva, Bitter Herbs (Tanto Cattiva), 2021, Collage, gesso, glass paint and organza on cotton, 110 x 80 cm, © Riccardo Malberti

Sofia Silva, Bitter Herbs (Struggle for Control), 2021, Acrylic, collage, gesso, oil, pastel and spray paint on cotton, 110 x 80 cm, © Riccardo Malberti