NISO is rooted in dialogue: between generations and visual languages, between the urgency of the new and the persistence of the essential. We support artists who challenge the surface—artists who think through colour, material, space, and history. 

The programme is structured around three interwoven directions: Discovery, Recovery, and Dialogue.

We support emerging and mid-career artists with distinctive visual languages and a sharp formal sensibility—practices that expand the scope of contemporary art.

We revisit significant yet under-recognised trajectories—works that continue to speak to the present and demand to be re-read through new perspectives. 

We connect artists across generations and geographies, activating affinities, tensions, and unexpected correspondences rather than stylistic alignment. 

Together, these directions shape the gallery's programme: supporting artists with conviction, revisiting overlooked histories, and creating dialogues across generations.

NISO is rooted in dialogue: between generations and visual languages, between the urgency of the new and the persistence of the essential.

Mateo Revillo (Spain, 1993) lives and works in Paris. His practice moves between painting, sculpture, and architectural intervention, and is grounded in an investigation of latent structures—forms assembled and held in suspension, where material, time, and spatial logic remain active.

Revillo works primarily with elemental materials such as lime, plaster, and pigment. These materials are engaged through a process-based approach in which surfaces accumulate, shift, and retain duration. The works appear as open configurations—fragments, planes, and volumes that register time as a physical condition. What becomes visible is a threshold where form remains provisional.

Each work is shaped by a tension between structure and fracture, construction and erosion. This tension extends to colour, which operates as a structural agent. Colour generates density, temperature, and vibration, anchoring the work in material time. It is revealed through process, attaching itself to layers, folds, and resistances embedded in the surface.

Revillo’s practice follows an open logic of transformation. Works often undergo successive stages: layers are added, elements displaced, decisions revised. What appears resolved may reopen; what once functioned as form may persist as trace. The work remains in a state of becoming, where persistence and instability coexist.

Although his work does not adopt explicit political representation, it operates through internal structural tension. Architectural references, material decisions, and visual codes acquire critical force through their capacity to suspend meaning and displace habitual forms of perception. In this sense, Revillo’s practice resonates with a conceptual and post-minimalist sensibility, where critique emerges from within form itself.

This form is put into tension by subjecting it to different perspectives and ways of seeing: architecture, anthropology, biology, and an open-ended curiosity that informs the work’s internal logic. Each piece operates as embodied thought, where material decisions function as spatial and cognitive propositions. The work proposes modes of attention and systems of relation that take shape through process.

Within the context of NISO’s programme, Revillo contributes a distinct analytical clarity. His practice approaches painting as structural inquiry; gesture is measured, the support fragmented, and the surface treated as an architectural plane of perception. Each work operates as a formal hypothesis—a site where material logic, spatial thinking, and perception remain in active relation.

Mateo_Revillo_BIO+CV_compressed.pdf

Tentación, V. , 2026 Beeswax on Cement, Plaster 330 x 180 cm

Liebana’s Bat, 2026 Beeswax on Cement, Plaster 300 x 120 cm

Dardo, 2026 Beeswax on Cement, Plaster 160 x 700 cm

U-Wing, 2026 Beeswax on Cement, Plaster 200 x 200 cm 

Teatro, 2024 Encaustic and casein paint on cement and plasterboard, wood.

Glauco Series, 2023 Fondo, Galería Alzueta, Barcelona, October 2023.

Ave - Políptico, 2022 Encaustic on cement and plaster, wood 250 x 250 cm 

Köln 2017, 2024 Encaustic on casein, cement and plaster, wood 120 x 270 cm Straight, No Chaser, curated by La Méditerranée, Zuzeum, Riga, 2024

Monument of Peace and Prosperity, 2025 Beeswax, Cement and Plaster 45 x 225 cm 

Amanda Ziemele (Latvia, 1990) lives and works in Riga. Her practice unfolds in a territory between painting and material reflection, where each surface acts as a field of experimentation, and each form as a visual hypothesis. More than representing, Ziemele summons sensitive structures: she organizes tensions, activates relationships, and formulates formal questions through the language of painting itself.

In her work, matter is active—almost behavioral. Edges become vectors, textures hold memory, and gestures repeat like formulas that resist closure. Color is not applied; it becomes a vibrating field, an atmosphere of pulsation between chromatic intensity and formal restraint. Nothing in her work arises from accumulation: everything responds to an intimate logic of playful precision. 

Ziemele operates through an expanded visual grammar that draws from modern abstraction, design, and certain ornamental or constructive logics, while also incorporating a physical perception of space and an expressive restraint bordering on the meditative. Her compositions seem to allude to encrypted codes, non-linguistic alphabets, emotional geometries that organize the pictorial plane without the need to explain it. These works do not impose themselves: they wait to be read, like rhythms still awaiting recognition. 

Her relationship with painting is neither retinal nor gestural in the traditional sense. Instead, it continuously questions how to see, how to organize, how to think the visual as an active system. The pictorial plane functions as a site for tactical decisions—where each form, each direction, each pause involves a negotiation between intuition and construction.

Far from any grandiloquence, her work moves with radical sobriety. A sobriety that does not exclude play, but refines it. That does not reject enjoyment, but makes it dependent on the intelligence of relationships. Her paintings, though contained, are structures open to accident, to deviation, to the inner rhythm born from proximity between dissonant elements.

Amanda Ziemele represented Latvian Pavilion in the Arsenale O day and night, but this is wondrous strange and therefore as a stranger give it a welcome at the 60th Venice Biennale (2024). Amanda Ziemele is a recipient of the Purvītis Prize 2021 granted for her solo exhibition Quantum Hair Implants on view in the Great Hall of the Latvian National Museum of Art in Riga. As part of the Prize, she developed the solo show Sun Has Teeth (2023) at the Cupola Hall of the Latvian National Museum of Art. 

Since 2016, Ziemele has held several solo exhibitions and has been engaged in various collaborative projects as well as actively participated in exhibitions including Duo Show (Ana Gzirishvili, Amanda Ziemele) at Polina Berlin Gallery, New York (2023), From “Abstraction” to Abstraction at Fundacja Stefana Gierowskiego, Warsaw (2022), Lazybones at Natalia Hug Gallery, Cologne (2021), Riga Notebook. Following the Lines of Wacław Szpakowski, Muzeum Sztuki, Łódź, Poland, (2021), Quantum Hair Implants at Kim? Contemporary Art Centre, Riga (2019) Being Like a Sponge, Candyland Gallery, Stockholm (2018), Crocodile Dilemma, 427 gallery, Riga (2016), among others. 

Amanda’s work can be found in several collections in Latvia and abroad, including the Latvian National Museum of Art, the VV Foundation and the Zuzāns Collection, Rīga.

Amanda_Ziemele_CV_compressed.pdf

Funnel, 2024 Oil on Canvas 234 x 170 x 60 cm Photography: Liga Spunde

Double Crisp, 2024 Oil on Canvas 260 x 206cm 

Close Your Eyes, 2024 Oil on Canvas 220 x 413 x 120cm Photography: Liga Spunde

Cool as a Cucumber, 2024 Oil on Canvas 261 x 365cm Photography: Liga Spunde

Morning, Sunshine!(Pottering Along), 2024 Oil on Canvas 377 x 651 x 122cm Photography: Liga Spunde

Installation view of O day and night, but this is wondrous strange...and therefore as a stranger give it welcome, 60th Venice Biennale, Latvian Pavillion, April 2024. Photography: Liga Spunde

The horizon is always far away. In a painting, however, it can be right in front of us. Curved Horizon, Sawako Nasu’s second solo exhibition at NISO, begins in the space that opens between these two distances.

The eye follows a line, a change in colour, a sense of depth, and moves away, only to return to the surface soon afterwards. A drip, an area where paint has been removed, or a change in the fabric itself interrupts this movement. For Sawako, this proximity does not contradict depth. It makes it possible. For an image to move into the distance, something must bring us back to what is in front of us.

The exhibition brings together conventional and structural canvases. In the former, the surface remains flat while the horizon line curves slightly. In the latter, almost the opposite happens: the line is painted straight, but the flexible canvas curves and pulls away from the wall. In one case, the image curves; in the other, the support.

Distance no longer belongs only to what we see within the painting. It also exists between the canvas and the wall, and between the work and us. As we move in front of it, these distances begin to affect one another.

Sawako uses an unexpected word to describe what she is looking for: weakness. “I think something weak can accept everything.” She does not mean a fragile or hesitant painting. She wants to reduce the authority of each element so that none imposes itself on the others. Image, surface, colour, structure, space and accident can remain together without having to organise themselves around a protagonist.

Something similar happens in the way she builds colour. If she puts green underneath, she may put red on top. Each layer erases part of the assertion of the one beneath it without making it disappear completely. The colour fields that emerge from this process appear transparent to her. What we see still contains something of what has been covered.

So when she speaks of reintegrating painting, she does not mean putting a whole back together. She uses another image: strands of yarn left tangled together, with no need to separate or order them. She also wonders whether a painting could hold together without a main melody, without a subject that gathers and orders everything else.

To think about this absence of a centre, Sawako imagines a beach. One watches the sun go down, not because one has decided to, but because at that moment there is nothing else demanding attention. Around us, the sea leaves behind things that have come from elsewhere and gradually lost their meaning along the way. Nothing orders them or determines what deserves to be looked at. Once there, they all become part of the landscape.

Sawako also says that she wants to make boring or insignificant paintings. She does not use these words ironically. She is interested in a painting that does not need to impose itself or continually explain what it means. Something can remain still and, precisely for that reason, accept things that a more assertive image would exclude or immediately turn into part of an argument.

Perhaps this is where the horizon becomes important again. A slightly curved line leads the eye into the distance. The material and the canvas bring it back towards us, while the curvature of the support opens a real distance between the painting and the wall. Neither movement fully imposes itself on the other.

The horizon can be very far away and, at the same time, right in front of us.

Text written by Christian Domínguez Dietzel

NISO presents Curved Horizon, Sawako Nasu's second solo exhibition with the gallery. 

NISO

NISO

10.09—24.10.26

10.09—24.10.26

Artists

Mateo Revillo

Mateo Revillo

Amanda Ziemele

Amanda Ziemele

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