Valletta Contemporary (VC) kickstarts its 2019 calendar with the first solo show of the year with artist Nadine Baldow’s Pristine Paradise – a set of colourful sculptures that will dominate the gallery spaces.

The artist opens her solo exhibition after a month-long residency in Gozo. A visual artist working mainly with site-specific installations, Baldow studied with Eberhard Bosslet, who exhibited his work at the VC in 2018, at the Academy of Fine Arts in Dresden after completing a woodcarving apprenticeship in the Alps.

Baldow’s work predominantly addresses the relationship between humankind and nature, and their ongoing impact on each other. Aside from her residency at the Gozo Contemporary, she has been an artist in residency in the Himalayas in India; the national park Sumava in the Czech Republic; the nature conservation island Vilm in Germany; and in Seoul, South Korea in cooperation with the Hansung University, where she created a site-specific intervention. She has also produced several public space interventions in Panjim, Dresden and Gorlitz and has exhibited her work in Switzerland, Germany, Poland, the Netherlands and India.

The installations exhibited at the VC, consisting of fridges, washing-machines and cooking facilities alike, are occupied by a very artificial kind of nature, a fungus-like organism, which deforms, overruns and corrodes the object itself.

Through her sculptures, Baldow explores the return of a dystopic nature of these common everyday human artefacts with bilious green, deep black, shocking pink and pastel blue shapes, sprayed by polyurethane foam.

Pristine Paradise opens to the public on Friday at 8pm with a guided walkthrough starting at 7pm. The show will run until April 5. A public talk with guests, moderated by Maren Richter, will be held on March 28 at 6pm.