Matea Bakula – Sweet Expanse (2023)

Matea Bakula – Sweet Expanse (2023)

In the geometric visual idiom and smooth yet strange surfaces of Sweet Expanse, the artist’s unique style can be seen from afar. The sculptures of Matea Bakula (b. Sarajevo, 1990, lives and works in Utrecht) often develop out of basic forms such as beams, cylinders and spheres: shapes that are easy to recognise, allowing the visitor to focus on what is happening on – or just below – the surface.

Bakula works with everyday materials, from beeswax, corrugated cardboard and polyurethane foam to plaster: materials that she is able to manipulate with effective interventions, misleading the viewer. These works range from ten-metre-long drill cores that turn out to be made of polyurethane foam to monumental columns that look like marble and from close up prove to be composed of paper clay, made from recycled paper.

A similar surprise occurs in the work that Bakula has developed for Eartheaters, in which she combines materials including sugar and polystyrene. As you approach the work, caramelised formations appear in the rectangular panels. Are you looking at an underwater crater, a karst landscape, or is a galaxy revealing itself? With this ‘framed universe’, the viewer is first enticed to focus on details – and then confronted with a universe.

When she speaks about her relationship with her materials, Bakula refers to herself as a ‘choreographer’, in the awareness that the materials she uses are often unpredictable, the result emerging through interaction, with her influence being of a temporary nature. This penetrates into her working methods. Bakula prefers to gather her material from the rubbish dump and likes to work with reusable components that, in the artist’s words, will go through many more ‘material reincarnations’.

Creating an otherworldly effect with modest resources – the artist calls it an ode to the everyday. By allowing visitors to reflect on the materials with which we surround ourselves and sending them on a journey through ‘deep time’ and the cosmos, she also ensures that Sweet Expanse is an ode to the imagination.