Silja Pogule

Silja Pogule is a Latvian textile artist and painter who creates wildly colorful wall tapestries by hand-tufting soft fabrics like woolen yarn.
Striking a delicate balance between graphic and painterly, Silja’s tactile constructions are comforting in their warmth and playful color palettes.

Traditionally "sweet" in art denotes something overly embellished, sensitive, or banal. There are no clearly defined rules, but a painting, a sculpture, a poem, or a song can be called "too sweet," for others to agree or disagree. In the "Collection of modular sweets", the sweetness was born in a different way - it was deliberately taken out of the world of tastes and sensations by the artist Silja Pogule, placed in the center of attention and contemplated as a more or less insistent desire. It is also taken out of the language for an emotional or critical look at the world - to eat something sweet, to live "sweetly", to fall asleep sweetly and dream or immerse yourself in sweet memories. The sweetness isolated from the flow of life and daily use is concentrated, in a way exaggerated and indicates that the artist Silja Pogule looks at sweetness conceptually. Sweetness is the key, sweetness is the story, and sweetness is guiding the exhibition. This was also the case in Silja Pogule's personal exhibition "Happiness" (2015), where you could see a painted pastry shop - three-tiered cakes, piles of whipped cream with strawberries, and exotic animals and plants. Back then it was more comical, more provocative, more ironic. This time, in the "Collection of modular sweets", the sweetness gently soaks into the soft wool fringes and bright colors. It flows harmoniously along the flat curves of the decorative forms created in the tufting technique and gathers in circles, bends and twists. The "Collection of modular sweets" consists of decorative textile paintings that can be combined as modules into a larger form. But in the composition of each module there are structures that repeat as abstract, deformed circles, dynamic twists or stylized motifs from nature - something scenic and figurative is also found in the tuftings of Silja Pogule. "My concepts and forms arise when I hold a woolen yarn in my hand, material always tells something," says Silja Pogule, confirming the connection with modernism. The form of the works recalls the insatiable luxury of Art Deco from the art of the 1920s and 30s, as well as the rhythmizing trends of the 1950s and 60s, which transformed people, things, landscape motifs and abstractly conceived squares into equal units, giving them an industrial character.

My paintings and textiles can be found in private collections in USA, Canada, Singapore, Brazil, Netherlands, UK, Ireland, Germany, Sweden, Finland, Norway, Denmark, Belgium, France, Russia, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania.