WELCOME TO MY GARDEN: Marria Pratts

A garden is not something you clean. Rather, it is something you take care of, lovingly, allowing living things to grow. In Marria Pratts’ new show for Everyday Gallery, painting is envisioned along these lines. The artist has broken with the idea of the studio as a clinical white cube; instead, she treats it like a garden. Moving away from painting as a promethean confrontation between the empty canvas and the creative originality of the painter, Pratt’s creative work is aimed at allowing things to develop naturally, attuned to the small ecosystem of her studio.

Some of the canvases and painterly objects presented in WELCOME TO MY GARDEN further develop the expressive style and iconography that has made Pratts one of the rising stars of contemporary European painting. In these canvases, the eerie ghosts are starring in a leading role. They are embedded within brightly lit pink and yellow colorfields. But the new developments in Pratts’ work are just as interesting. They allow the viewer to unwrap the metaphor of the garden as a way to understand Pratt’s approach to painting, and also tell us something about how the painter’s work critically engages with the world we are living in.