For Angelika Poels, a visual artist from the Netherlands, art is a means of questioning reality and revealing the layered nature of perception. Her practice is rooted in the idea that nothing ever needs to remain the same. This belief grants her the freedom to continually explore, surprise, and estrange qualities that define her eclectic and modern style.
Poels embraces variety in form, material, and artistic discipline, ensuring her work remains dynamic and engaging. Whether working in sculpture, installation, or experimental projects, she sees each medium as an opportunity to challenge assumptions and open new ways of seeing.
The Role of Layering
At the heart of Poels’ art lies the concept of layering, both literal and metaphorical. She often removes familiar forms from their context and repositions them in a new light, asking viewers to reconsider what they think they know. What seems ordinary and self-evident becomes, through her approach, strange, intriguing, or even confrontational.
By overlapping textures, forms, and meanings, she not only builds visual depth but also invites audiences to peel back conceptual layers. This creates a sense of estrangement that stimulates curiosity and dialogue.
Social Issues in Abstraction
While Poels’ works are rich in abstraction, they are also deeply connected to contemporary social concerns. For example, her series of ice sculptures reflected on the pressing issue of climate change. Instead of presenting it literally, she translated the theme into a metaphor of fragility and impermanence, giving space for reflection and interpretation rather than imposing a fixed narrative.
Through this approach, Poels positions art as a tool for dialogue. She avoids prescriptive answers, allowing her audience to explore their own perspectives within the spaces she creates.
Thousand Colors and a Single Tale
One of Poels’ notable works, Thousand Colors and a Single Tale, embodies her layered and transformative artistic vision. The sculpture draws inspiration from both the Mountain of Seven Colors in Peru and the legendary collection of stories known as One Thousand and One Nights.
Crafted from EPS (expanded polystyrene), a material typically overlooked in the art world, the sculpture takes on the appearance of stone. This transformation highlights Poels’ ability to elevate the everyday into something extraordinary.
The work resembles a landscape in flux, as if the mountain itself were telling its own story. Each layer whispers of connection to the earth, while the mythic allusions suggest the unfolding of timeless fairytales. Just as Scheherazade spun countless tales into one larger narrative, this sculpture contains within its form multiple layers of meaning at once geological, cultural, and imaginative.
Art as Dialogue
Across her oeuvre, Poels creates spaces where recognition meets estrangement, where the familiar becomes strange, and where viewers are invited into dialogue with the work. Her art is not about fixed interpretations but about opening doors to multiple possibilities.
Sometimes the encounter is unsettling; sometimes it is quietly contemplative. But always, it engages the viewer as an active participant. Through her layering, abstractions, and metaphors, Poels underscores that reality itself is never static but shifting, multifaceted, and alive.
Conclusion
Angelika Poels’ art embodies transformation, questioning, and dialogue. By continually shifting between materials, forms, and metaphors, she demonstrates how art can reflect the layered nature of existence itself. Works like Thousand Colors and a Single Tale bridge the earthly and the mythical, the ordinary and the extraordinary, showing us that within every surface lies a deeper story.
Through her practice, Poels reminds us to look again, to embrace uncertainty, and to discover meaning in the layered complexity of the world around us.
