Painter Nina Čelhar has been engaged in painting contemporary residential architecture for several years. She is particularly interested in spaces that are tailor-made for the individual and at the same time in harmony with the surroundings. Her paintings are characterised by a refined composition that depicts the chosen motif with few strokes and without unnecessary details and descriptions, as well as by a limited colour palette that includes only black and white in addition to shades of green and beige. White generally occupies a special place in Nina Čelhar’s painting, as she uses it a lot and in different ways – as a monochrome background to the subject, as a veil that covers it completely, as a mist that dilutes its physicality, or as light coming from within it. Through all this whiteness – regardless of its specific use – the motifs depicted seem dematerialised, translucent, as if they were stuck halfway between existence and non-existence, so that they appear like a possibility, a more or less feasible illusion, a wish, a dream.

The present exhibition by Nina Čelhar is special in several aspects. Not only because the artist is presenting her works on paper for the first time, but also because they are slightly different from the other works in her oeuvre. Here, the artist shifts attention from the external image of architecture to its interior, that is, the living spaces and the objects that fill them. She is concerned with everyday things such as tables, chairs, coat hangers, bags, papers and pens, which she shows in more or less stylised form on a pure white background on which one can only intuit the basic coordinates of the room, and sometimes not even that. In some places the objects are scattered indiscriminately over the entire pictorial surface, in others, they are connected into a logical whole (a desktop, for instance), with this or that having disappeared into the whiteness. Some are quite clearly recognisable, others are shown to us in parts, and still others are only patches of colour of indeterminate shape. For this reason, they seem to hover between existence and non-existence, much like the external images of architectures, but in a more radical way – we do not see them as an option that is gradually fulfilled, or as an illusion that fades with time. We see them as something that is and is not at the same time. Something in between.

These works were created in the last two years and represent the artist’s authentic response to the new Coronavirus pandemic, which brings constant (temporary) changes to our lives, along with uncertainty and unpredictability. These works reflect today’s world “in pieces”, a world that is both a ruin of something past and a blueprint for something future, a world that seeks comfort in the present and meaning in the absence.

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Nina Čelhar (1990) graduated in Painting from the Academy of Fine Arts and Design in Ljubljana, where she also completed her master’s degree in 2018. During her studies, she furthered her knowledge at the Hochschule für Grafik und Buchkunst in Leipzig. She has exhibited independently in all major galleries in Slovenia and several times abroad, most recently at the 12 Star Gallery in London. She has received several awards for her work and her paintings are included in several collections in Slovenia and abroad. She lives and works in Ljubljana.
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