Encompassing a wide range of media, mainly sculpture, collage, photo and installation, the Polish London-based artist Maria Loboda explores essential dichotomies such as nature-culture or spirit-matter. By the means of spatial installations of beautiful yet impersonal objects, she aims at staging the concealed intertwining of order and chaos, rationality and instinct or emotion, archetypal and contemporary.

- Mountain and Valley
invokes the Minimalist and Conceptual movements associated with Op Art and Hard-Edge geometry, which focus on pure abstraction, such as lines, symmetry, colour interactions, physicality, scale and proportion. The Bauhaus connoisseurs will also recognise the influence of Josef Albers' drawings from his 1950s and 1960s' series - Homage to the Square
in the framework of which he designed a very similar zigzag shape with an alternating colours stripe pattern. Prior to this piece, Loboda expressed her admiration for the designer Eileen Gray, famous for her lacquered wooden pieces and panels.

This sculpture is a relatively small wooden object to be placed on the ground, consisting of three continuous oblique planes. It presents a pleasant and harmless appearance, a perfectly designed shape, a polished and smooth finish with joyous white and blue regular parallel stripes, recalling Daniel Buren's installations or modernist ornamental aesthetic for public park and seaside furniture or mercantile design.

Maria Loboda conceives austerity, simplicity and the anonymity of machine-like precision as a potentiality of expression, simultaneously underpinned by hidden historical, philosophical and spiritual references. Thus, despite its apparent detached objectivity and neutrality, the piece refers not only to the capacity of pure abstract forms to conjure up reality and nature, but also to their potentiality to trigger emotional associations.

KS