ALICE’S BIRTHDAY

Ildze Balcere, 2025
150 × 120 cm
Embroidery, acrylic, mixed media

Alice’s Birthday invites the viewer into a world where familiar rules quietly disappear.

Inspired by the atmosphere of fantasy, absurdity and altered reality associated with Alice’s world, Ildze Balcere creates a scene that feels simultaneously playful and strangely sophisticated. The monumental female figure, the surreal gathering and unexpected details form a visual narrative in which celebration becomes theatre and reality begins to behave like a dream.

The artist introduces the work with her characteristic sense of humour:

“All of Alice’s guests were seated at the table, drinking tea from walnut-shell-sized cups. Only the hares were allowed to drink directly from the sugar bowl…”

Behind this playful story lies one of the central qualities of Balcere’s practice — the meeting of imagination and extraordinary manual discipline.

Created through embroidery, acrylic and mixed media, the work combines an immediate contemporary visual language with an exceptionally slow process of making. What appears spontaneous from a distance reveals, on closer inspection, countless stitches, textures and traces of the artist’s hand.

This tension between the fantastic and the physical gives Alice’s Birthday its particular character. It is a work about entering another reality — one where scale changes, logic becomes optional and imagination is allowed to set the rules.

And perhaps that is the invitation hidden inside the work:

for a moment, to stop behaving as though everything has to make sense.

A unique work.

Available through L’atelier d’Art Trence.
For acquisition, additional details or a private presentation, please contact the gallery.