Her major in architecture, influences Stella Rahola Matutes’s work, informing her practice and her interest towards landscape and its representation. She studies how contemporaneity builds its symbols; how new economies join technical development to construct scenarios before belonging to fiction; and how utopias and fantasies are nowadays getting embodied in our cityscapes, including not only their accomplishments but also their failures.

Enclosed in her formal concerns there are issues of globalization and lack of identity, both translated into decadent model-like installations and pristine glass sculptures. Additionally, she uses video and photography to give a further reading of her work: as a paradox of postmodernity, she subverts the photogenic and the picturesque, where the original is already a representation.

Significantly, craft strongly underpins her work. Antagonising the new forms of capitalism and responding to the alienation and derogation of self-awareness driven by modern forms of production, Rahola Matutes favours manual work claiming a background of humans’ know-how. She pursues a material culture that ultimately renews our relationship with nature and landscape.