Liste Year
Year of Birth
Country of Birth
Presented by
2021
1989
Switzerland
PHILIPPZOLLINGER
Working primarily on aluminium sheets and as such creating a laboratory-like appearance, Sile makes use of an unusual diversity of uncanny and ordinary materials: sliding tubes, oil paint irrigations and support systems, miniature constructions of readymade graphite pencil lead, flickering gelatine emblems, thread traps and borderlines, hand-tapped image traces, opaque inhabited capsules and topographical maps, which morph into smoke rings, voluminous spirals, warped space vortexes and snakeskin patterns.
Intricate visual scenarios elaborate into layouts of clusters, categories, menus, units and sets. The artist combines mental imagery with analytic divisions and builds up an interwoven vocabulary of psycho-spatial typologies in flux. Sile’s oeuvre consists of human-scale constructions, models made from painting materials, fictional dialogs called CASES, including translations into smaller outputs of stickers, tattoos and CG renderings.
Elza Sile was born 1989, in Latvia and lives in Zurich. In 2019, Sile graduated from ZHdK Zurich. Recent solo exhibitions include at PHILIPPZOLLINGER (Zurich, 2021); unanimous consent (Zurich, 2020) and Kulturfolger (Zurich, 2020). She has participated in numerous two-person and group shows, such as at KIM? Contemporary Art Center (Riga, 2020); Kunsthalle Zurich (2020); Hamlet (Zurich, 2020) and Galerie Kirchgasse (Steckborn, 2020). In 2020, Sile was the recipient of the Werkschau Prize, this year she received the art stipend of the city of Zurich and is nominated for the Swiss Art Awards.