Marta Vovk (born in 1989 in Lviv, Ukraine; lives and works in Berlin) graduated from Kunsthochschule Weißensee, Berlin in 2017. In terms of content, her artistic practice moves between autobiographical fragments, tenors of sensitivity and a sociocultural touch. Pop-cultural elements go hand in hand with existential questions of the modern, challenged Self. This creates an associative interplay between banality and pathos, self-optimizing performance and anxiety, infantile web culture with its cute kittens and Major Depression. Figures, symbols, advertising items, typos and slogans—each with their distinct messages and network of meanings—emerge simultaneously. Their specific inter-relatedness, however, remains questionable.

Her paintings pursue a strong awareness of their own material with its charged and contextual meanings and references. Primarily, she works with acrylic paint on linen and cotton fabrics. She also likes to use Window Color and spray paint—materials that are commonly regarded as outdated. Formally speaking, her works combine and overlap both visual and graphic elements. The latter are created by using touch-up pencils and colored pencils, thus alluding to formal aspects of stickers and childish doodles. She considers her emotional and personal experiences as an archive of self-referential fragments, motifs, figures and sentences, each of which—during the painting process—are ultimately translated into a visual composition.

As for her installations, She tries to work with the absurdities that are offered to costumers in a world of products. Often, She makes use of abstruse decorative products, feel-good items, feel-at-home goods and thus things that are supposed to generate comfort and ease. This sort of aesthetic, with its seemingly innocent meanings and affects, combined with ist hypocrisy, is something that she sees as provocation. The apparent banal in her works, both from a formal and conceptual perspective, is highly appealing to her. Free of pathos, the great expressive artistic gesture is reduced to a playful hint. What she doesn't need is truisms in the style of old masters.

Recent group shows of Vovk include Defying Currents, The Shelf by Pandion, Berlin (2018), Sorgen (International) Vol.4, SOX, Berlin, Masters Salon, Royal Academy of Fine Arts, Antwerp (2017), Böse Blüten Projektraum Bethanien, Berlin (2017) and Quelltext, Brandenburgischer Kunstverein, Potsdam (2016).