Visiting Nina Silverberg ́s studio at the Empordà residency is like peering through a keyhole into another world loaded with symbolic meaning. The imagery is intimate, intricate, and suggestive all at once, captured in a subdued oil palette, mostly on small format surfaces. With recurring themes and objects it is like opening an ancient croll of codes, or a library in itself. In simple scenes, where there is never a figure present, we find different sorts of manmade objects. The scale can range from a house to a book, to a bed, to a glove, but there is never a hint of what had gone on before the scene was captured in time.

With clear allusions to medieval art, small vignettes or icons narrate intimate stories, or rather moments, where the stillness makes us aware of basic human emotions and the loneliness of life at large. Houses showered under meticulously executed raindrops, reveal inside and outside perspectives of what it means to be protected and sheltered. This concept of refuge is present often, depicted in a particularly simplistic or distorted perspective. Neat lines, geometrical angles, and color fields make up the works on wood, canvas, or linen.

Another protagonist is the gloves, in different appearances or contexts, but always suggestive. Born during the pandemic the glove in Silverberg ́s work is an ambiguous symbol, on the one hand permitting touch, contact, and protection, yet on the other hand, again as in all her work, marking the boundary between “in” and “out”, and between “me” and “you”.

In all works, we can find containers of something significant: houses as containers of life, books as containers of stories, gloves as containers of hands, drawers as containers of things, but never is it made explicit what exactly there is to be contained. This absence makes the invisible ever so tangible, the elephant in the room. The drops of rain can convert to teardrops, in “books of tears” where no word is written, but all is said. A blank book often appears, or with its pages turned away, so that once again, we are left to guess…The suggestive depiction of elements is mysterious but then starts to make sense in its context when read in relation to the next painting. Slowly a language starts to unfold that is delicate and tender, yet minimalist in appearance.

Nina Silverberg is able to transmit the tenor of the liminal space between the world and oneself in a unique body of work. She draws not only upon her own experience of illness, which made her an onlooker onto her body, but also zooms out to include elements of Medieval works that have inspired the Italian artist since early childhood. It is in these shifts between small and large, close and far, that a unique, almost mythical or fairytale-like painting is brought to life.

24-10-2024 to 19-11-2024

Alzueta Gallery Madrid

C/ Marqués de Monasterio, 1
28004 Madrid

Tel: +34 91 362 99 67
madrid@alzuetagallery.com

Monday to Friday 09:00 – 14:00 / 16:00 – 19:00 and Saturday 10:30 – 14:30