Miranda Skoczek creates works of monumental colour and texture, offering respite and reflection in a busy world.
There is more to Miranda Skoczek’s paintings than immediately meets the eye. They are built intuitively and in layers, from colours, patterns and objects that she absorbs in her immediate home environment – and all over the world. They are often abstract, sometimes with figurative elements; they focus on paint and colour, process and time, to create a space that takes us somewhere other, outside the material world. Inspiration comes from art and antiquities, folk art and contemporary design – and through obsessive consumption of images. Skoczek describes herself as “a sponge,” confessing to VAULT: “I have 95,000 photographs on my phone.”
The surface of her painting Regeneration (the clever tree) (2021) – exhibited in The Celestial and the Madness at Nicholas Thompson Gallery in 2021 – she described on Instagram: “My paintings can’t be experienced from just front on – one must move around the work to really see them. Contrasts in shiny and matte, thick and thin applications of paint make for difficult documentation of my pictures. Bloody nuisance really.” Her observation (and its self-deprecating humour) highlights the holistic nature of her practice as not only immersive – her home is densely decorated with art, rugs, antiquities, fabrics and objects from the present and the past – but also far-reaching.
