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, image and history. 

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

We support emerging and mid-career artists with distinctive visual languages and a sharp formal sensibility, whose practices expand the field of contemporary art through engagement with material, image, space, and form.

We revisit significant yet under-recognised trajectories. Through exhibitions and research, we bring overlooked bodies of work into renewed conversation with the present.

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 and the heart of our activity: 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

NISO is pleased to announce its debut participation in Art Cologne with a curated booth featuring gallery artists Sawako Nasu, Mateo Revillo and Amanda Ziemele. 

NISO

NISO

05.11—09.11.26

05.11—09.11.26

Artists

Mateo Revillo

Mateo Revillo

Amanda Ziemele

Amanda Ziemele

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