16 Branches High : Karolina Albricht

STUDIO WEST is proud to present 16 Branches High, a solo show by London-based Polish painter and sculptor Karolina Albricht. The exhibition presents abstracted painted works of differing scale, juxtaposed to an exploratory body of sculpture. Thematically the pieces on show are a continuation of Albricht’s investigation of both formal and metaphysical concerns including colour, space, the body, movement, and gesture.

The exhibition title comes from the lyrics of Nick Cave and The Bad Seed’s Spinning Song.  The phrase ‘16 Branches High’ has been pasted in Albricht’s studio for months, watching over and influencing the many facets of the artists’ ever-developing practice. Music, syncopation, and rhythm underpin Albricht’s practice. Often working to playlists, the organic line and graphic shapes seen throughout the works in the show mirror the dissonance, and abstraction of many of Caves’ songs.

Albricht intends to create works that are born of a sense of intuition. Recycling studio detritus to create textured surfaces and additions, many of Albricht’s works straddle both painting and sculpture. Sometimes anthropomorphic, the artist uses shredded jute as ‘hair’; dried paint fragments and aptly named ‘Other Stuff’ (pumice, sand, grit, and calico among other things) to fashion work that escapes the expected boundary of two dimensional painting.

Albricht investigates the relationship between the body and the canvas, for her, paintings allow her to translate the figure. The movement of her body can be observed in the works, both small and large. Smooth colours, jagged lines and nearly recognizable forms overlap each other and create emotional and gestural visual spaces. Her largest canvases are like realms to be entered, dwarfing the body of the viewer as they stand and observe. The smaller works, meanwhile, contort shapes, objects, and reality, creating ‘paintings’ that burst out from their own seams, breaching conventional constraints of the canvas.

“Time seems to become increasingly compressed as the scale of my work decreases. The smaller the work, often the longer it takes to create. I become so absorbed in them, it’s hard to explain.”

Her newest venture, small scale sculptural works, recall the apertures of Barbara Hepworth’s forms. The textural amalgamation of ‘hair’, hessian and other materials suggest Meret Oppenheim’s surreal, fluffy objects. For Albricht, these pieces are not a ruptured break with her painting practice, but instead continue the three-dimensional thinking that is essential to her methodology across her creative output. The sculptures further emphasise the importance of physicality in Albricht’s practice. The sculptures showcase the intimate relationship of material and artist; one can sense Albricht’s hands manipulating the Papier-mâché Clay surface to create her gang of strangely human assemblages.

The exhibition thus captures Karolina Albricht at a pivotal moment in her career, as she moves into the realm of three-dimensional creation. The exhibition extends her established abstract painting practice and invites the viewer into a constructed world where painting and sculpture collide.