Upon entering the exhibition space, the visitor dives into a cosmos of nearly endless creativity, led to discover an artist, who transforms the REH-transformer space into a playful planet. Eva Mitala’s cosmological show features works produced in the last two years in Athens and Berlin. Over 100 paintings depicting images of planets, skyscrapers, pyramides, octahedrons are organically combined with images of snake-, cat-, brain-, dance- and childhood pictures. Architectonic structures and symbolic elements in black and white are penetrated and entwined by poetic imagery and occasional appearances of the shiny and energetic color pink. For her pink is punk. It is her punk attitude and her struggle for humanity in everyday life, aiming to attain more freedom in a systematized and domesticated world full of bureaucracy. The childhood references in Mitala’s universe could metaphorically represent her rebelious ethos and her Greek heritage - a consciousness that is being eroded by civilized urban construction,  reflecting on the human condition and the perpetual struggle for emanicipation within the contemporary world. However, returning to nature is not her way, as Eva Mitala holds a visionary ambition: to disrupt structures that suppress natural human energy and sensitivity in modern life.

Mitala's artistic discourse exceeds the conventional paradigms of nature and culture.

In her futuristic paintings and installations, the division between nature and culture becomes obsolete. Nature encompasses us and everything that surrounds us. It becomes both subject and material simultaneously. In her approach to transformed materials and images, their origins and interactions, the artist discards distinctions between the synthetic and the organic, man-made and natural. She presents a nature that transcends (beyond) its sensory manifestations. Nature, as depicted in her works, emerges not as an external entity but as an intrinsic facet of human existence- a force to be reckoned with, intertwining seamlessly with the fabric of societal constructs.

Eva Mitala also experiments with silkscreen techniques, discovering in her studio how to embrace imperfection, translating the defaults and irregularities of the process into a punk aesthetic.  Furthermore,  her exploration of furniture design incorporating woodworking, painting, handmade silkscreen, and spray paint  serves as a commentary on the socio-cultural illusions pervasive within the contemporary art history . 

Marcus Kettel

June 2014

Berlin