Patricia Strickland
Born 1964, the artist grew up between Germany and the US, navigating a succession of cultural and social environments that fostered an enduring intellectual independence. The absence of fixed family structures placed unfiltered dialog and engagement with her environment at the center of her formative years.
More than her formal training in Munich and London, the many cities she has inhabited over the years have been the primary framework for her artistic vocabulary. From the grounded pragmatism of Zürich, Boston, West Texas, LA & NY to the constructed escapism of Amsterdam, Ibiza, Paris, San Francisco & Monaco ; the cultural codes and human dichotomies of these places provide the conceptual foundations of her work.
current art work
# PHI - Macro Level:
A study in human geometry, seven bronze cast polished cubes, engraved, 2025 1/4
This sculptural work, is a three-dimensional embodiment of the golden ratio, recognized for its connection to natural harmony, reinterpreted as a mathematical allegory for the psychological and sociological architecture of society. Composed of seven engraved bronze squares, cast in increasing, then decreasing sizes, reflecting a golden curve of growth and decline. The cycle represents a structure drawn from ɸ (phi) underscoring the underlying calibration of human behavior.
The cube sequence begins with "Initiatus"(6x6 cm edge length), desribing a vanguard or harbinger, a potent and rare luminary. It progresses through "Innovatus"(10x10 cm), the pioneering, forging innovators and disrupters, followed by "Liberalis"(20x20 cm), enlightened, civic humanists, culminating in the largest square "Mediocris"(39x39 cm), the cultural mean and conformists. Then, the scale recedes through "Conservatus"(28x28cm), the institutional sentinels, atavistic architectures of inertia, decreasing to "Moderatus"(15x15 cm), the stagnating, hieratic force and finally returns to near its initial size with "Rigidus"(7x7cm), reactionary, othodox, with an obdurate resistance to change. This symmetrical flow evokes the cyclical nature of societal evolution, in which movements begin with the few, expand to the many, and contract again into resistance or redefinition. These archetypes are not static societal classes, but enduring motivational patterns that surface repeatedly across eras, cultures and within each individual. We all house this full spectrum, experiencing a mosaic of often contradictory impulses: aspiration and anxiety, evolution and inertia. "This is a meditation on individual and socieltal fractures and convergences".
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# Tribute to Audio:
Backlit wall instalations, watercut aluminum plate, engraved, nickel plated WAV-file visualization, 190 cm lenght x max 70 cm height, 2025 1/4
Tribute to Audio is an homage to sound.
This ongoing project visually captures resonant and evocative fragments of divers forms of audio. When in the early nineties WAV files began to escape the confines of studio use and enter public consciousness, I discovered the perfect medium to honor certain creators of music, speech, cinematic dialogue, sounds of nature and sonic expression, rendering their impulses into the language of form. Each inspiration is transformed into a visual waveform, water-cut precisly. These plates are transmutations of auditive perception, giving body to the intangible.
The curated sound bits span musical epochs, genres, media recordings, contemporary compositions and dialogues that echo in cultural memory, each chosen by intuitive resonance. The subjective selection is shaped by personal impact, yet each work gestures outward, paying homage to the vast lineage of sonic creation.
Tribute to audio is a manifestation of transition: the movement from digital abstraction into tangible form, crystallizing the paradox of audio itself - transient in life, enduring once transformed. Ephemerality made permanent.
# Compound
White marble cubes engraved, edge length 8 cm, 100 cubes per city-pile; Los Angels, New York, London, 2025 1/4
Compound is an ongoing sculptural project that reflects on the city as a collective human construct while acknowledging its profound role in the artists own life. Each iteration consists of one hundred white marble cubes, piled randomly and every surface is engraved with names of individuals, both real and fictional, who have in ways monumental or modest, shaped the identity of a metropolis.
The first three cities represented are London, New York, and Los Angeles. Impactfull places that provide shifting vantage points from which to perceive society and the undercurrent of metropolitan life. In perpetuity urbanites engage in the construction, deconstruction, impermanence, solitity, decay and renewal of their cities. "I have always been drawn to stone piles on construction sites; temporary accumulations of cobblestones awaiting their next use. Once part of a surface that allowed pedestrians to move smoothly ahead, they are now piled in suspension, waiting to become part of a new order. Piles in general embody the transient nature of urban development: permanence and impermanence folded into each other. Compound echoes this quality, its cubes resembling both foundations and fragments, both monument and debris".
"The many names chosen, stem from all backgrounds and epochs. Native inhabitants, settlers, politicians, industrialists, artists, laborers, fictional figures, entertainers, builders, social-and-sex workers ... acknowledge that a city is built by countless visible, obscure, contoversial and inspirational participants. Yet the choices of whom to include are inevitably subjective and can only ever represent a fraction of what any metropolis truly requires to emerge, expand, and endure. The work is therefore both analytical and personal, a selective homage shaped by cultural influence, inspiration, interaction, research & memory, but always gesturing toward the immeasurable multiplicity that defines a city and it`s residue I encounter, permanence contrast with the ceaseless flux of urban life, crystallizing the paradox of cities, enduring in form, yet forever provisional in meaning."
# Date Night on the Rocks
Variable installation, white marble, engraved, polished bronze cast tabletop 60x60 cm, 2025 1/4
Date Night on the Rocks stages an unstable architecture of intimacy. Eschewing conventional legibility and support structures, the artist constructs two seating units and a table entirely from roughly hewn white marble boulders, carefully balanced to form a composition that is as contingent as it is deliberate. The absence of traditional function foregrounds the work's preoccupation with emotional precarity and performative domesticity. The centerpiece, a 60x60 cm cast bronze tabletop, slightly tilted, introduces a material and symbolic counterpoint to the stone assemblage. Its polished surface invites both reflection and distortion, complicating the viewer's visual and conceptual engagement. The engraved phrase "If I throw up, will you hold back my hair?" operates as a fragment of conversational intimacy, hovering between abjection and care, irony and sincerity. A second inscription "Jaded Yet?" etched into one of the marble seats, signals emotional exhaustion within the iterative cycles of romantic exchange.
Through its interplay of permanence and instability, polish and rupture, Date Night on the Rocks interrogates the architecture of the couple as both sculptural and psychological construct. The piece echoes minimalist concerns with form and balance, while invoking the relational strategies of late 20th century conceptualism. It invites a reading in which the geological temporality of the materials undermines the fleeting, often fraught rituals of human connection. The result is a mise-en-scène of desire and disillusionment.
# Smoke Screen, # Blind Spot, # Deep Fake
Nickel-plated, engraved, aluminum wall-plates, three elements, 60x60x5 cm, 2025 1/4
This triptych of panels functions simultaneously as a reflective surface and semantic device. Each bear a centrally engraved phrase, smoke screen, blind spot & deep fake, terms drawn from contemporary language to denote deception, distortion, or concealed complexity. Arranged in sequence or independently, the panels reflect the viewer, implicating them in the reading. The result is an active tension between visibility and omission. Together, these pieces operate as a minimalist lexicon of illusion. They expose the slipperiness of perception and the instability of truth. In confronting one's own image along these culturally loaded terms, we are invited into a space of self-surveillance and critical recognition.
# Soap Box
Bronze cast pedestal, polished, engraved, 60x60x15 cm, 2025 1/4
Soap Box reactivates a historical form of public address, elevated both literally and materially into a minimalist sculpture. Its surface reflects the viewer while grounding them within a lineage of civic speech. The central engraving, Soap Box, refers to the improvised oratory platforms first used in London's Hyde Park in 1855, where citizens of all classes would voice their grievances and convictions in public. Here, the act of speaking becomes metaphor. A conceptual stage, the piece opens a contemplative space around authority, voice, and visibility. In an age where platforms are increasingly digital, privatized, and algorithmically filtered, Soap Box offers a moment of tangible stillness to reconsider the architecture of public discourse.
# Echo Chamber
Bronze cast pedestal, polished, engraved, 60x60x15 cm, 2025 1/4
Echo Chamber is a sculptural reflection both literal and ideological. The term, borrowed from contemporary discourse on media and politics, refers to recursive loops of affirmation in which dissent is excluded and distortion amplified. The work operates as both platform and provocation. As the viewer confronts their own likeness, they are positioned within the very system the piece critiques. What appears reflective becomes reflexive. "Echo Chamber interrogates the architecture of modern discourse, questioning our selective listening, insular engagements and our complicity in fostering confimation bias."
# One Fuck
Pedestal, whole white marble block polished, engraved, 60x60x15 cm, 2025 1/4
Carved from a single block of white marble, One Fuck presents itself as a minimalist pedestal. Its only gesture is spare central inscription but its semantic weight is disarming. Positioned on a base traditionally used to commemorate, the work collapses the distance between the sacred and the carnal, confronting the viewer with the absurd proportionality between the human ego and its origin point, a single fleeting biological act. One Fuck is at once irreverent and eleatic. It casts an almost clerical light on notions of legacy, importance, and identity, reminding us that even the most elaborately constructed selfhood ultimately rests on a moment of primal contingency. The result is a sculptural paradox, a monument to the unmonumental, rendered in the language of eternity.
# Futile
Six polished bronze cast cobblestones, engraved, 6x6x6 cm, 2019 1/4
Futile represents a modular field of 6 bronze cast cobblestones, randomly arrangeable. Two bear the word conclusion, two follows & two remain blank. The work functions as both a sculptural text and a conceptual sequence, an inquiry into the instability of certainty and the temporality of judgment. By pairing the terms across an even distribution, the piece resists resolution. The viewer is drawn into the recursive logic where every conclusion is only a prologue to the next unfolding fragment. Cast in bronze, a material associated with permanence, the transient nature of understanding is paradoxically enshrined, rendering the act of finality itself suspect. Futile speaks to the futility of arriving at absolute meaning in a world where context is in perpetual flux. It's a quiet monument to the epistemological hesitation, conclusion follows conclusion...
itself.