Marta Enkel

Marta Enkel paints interiors: a bathroom, a stairwell, the corner of a kitchen with the light coming in badly. She works from memory and from bad photographs, usually her own, taken quickly and never intended as reference. The paintings begin as recognisable rooms and are then pushed until the architecture stops holding. A wall becomes a plane of wet colour that could equally be a curtain or a body or nothing.

Everything is done in one sitting, wet into wet, typically between eleven and fifteen hours. Enkel does not go back into a dry painting. If it fails, and she says most of them do, it is scraped down and the panel is reused. This gives the surviving works an unstable, still-moving quality that she is unwilling to fake by other means.

The rooms are not autobiographical in any direct way, though they are all Dutch and all rented. Enkel moved to Amsterdam at twenty-two and has lived in eleven apartments since. She has described the paintings as an attempt to hold on to spaces she was never going to keep, which is close to sentimental, and then immediately undercut it by pointing out that the real subject is how badly oil paint behaves when you refuse to let it dry.

Enkel graduated from the Rijksakademie in 2019. Notes for a Wet Room at The Annex is her second solo presentation with the gallery. Her work has been acquired by the Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam and the Frans Hals Museum. She joined the gallery in 2022.