Founded in 2021, NISO is committed to supporting the next generation of talents as well as rediscovering the legacy of XXth Century artists whose remarkable contributions to Art History have gone unnoticed in recent times. Located in Central London, the gallery provides a dynamic platform to present solo exhibitions and intergenerational dialogues in collaboration with artists, estates, and representing galleries. 

NISO has been committed to supporting the next generation of talents as well as rediscovering the legacy (...)

Supporting early-career artists, rediscovering overlooked masters from the XXth Century. 

Martina Quesada, born in 1987, lives and works between Buenos Aires and Paris. Quesada has explored how meaning is constructed from various societal perspectives, often questioning our ways of seeing and remembering. She seeks to move beyond social dogmas and challenge what appears certain and unchanging. Her practice encompasses sculpture, installation, and video, frequently employing simple geometric systems to investigate the interplay between the visible and the invisible, as well as the transitional spaces where transformation occurs. Through her research, she aims to disarticulate functional viewpoints and foster new ways of perception. Her works are featured in both institutional and private collections, including the MACBA and MALI museum.

CV BIO STATEMENT.pdf

Lectura de una aparición y una huída, 2022 Pigment, paper, glass and wood 40 x 340 cm 

The borders are fragile II, 2023 Pigment, gesso, marble dust, Argentinian native plants, wood on canvas 142 x 217 x 4 cm 

Amanda Ziemele (b.1990) is a Riga-based artist who keeps her artistic practice open for different explorations. She is interested in the formal qualities of painting framed by the ways how context and form interact. Ziemele adapts to site-specific settings that trigger situational associations. As a result, interventions are formalised through the medium specific peculiarities whereby the spatial and aesthetic experience is mediated in humorous and sometimes paradoxical ways. Ziemele holds a BA degree in painting from the Art Academy of Latvia and has completed Diploma studies in Interdisciplinary and experimental painting at the Dresden Academy of Fine Arts where her Diploma project Gaining Ground received a Freundeskreis der HfBK Dresden prize as the best graduate’s project. 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 (EN)2025 (1).pdf

Funnel, 2024 Oil on Canvas 234 x 170 x 60 cm 

In celebration of our one-year anniversary, NISO presents 𝘉𝘌𝘠𝘖𝘕𝘋, an exhibition that challenges the boundaries of painting, transforming it into a field of expansion. Matter, form, and space are redefined  in a radical exploration bridging tradition and contemporaneity. Curated by Nicolas Sorbac and Christian Dominguez. 

“Painting is not a limit, but a threshold.”

Everything that was ever important happens at a tiny point, suspended in the abyss. A point of light, a fleeting glow in the infinite vastness. This is art: a flash, an insistence against nothingness, a gesture that expands beyond itself. From its origins, painting has been a search, an attempt to fix the ephemeral and capture the elusive. It has been surface and depth, sign and void, matter and energy. But it has never been static. Painting has always been a transit, a perpetual movement between image and idea, between form and its dissolution.

BEYOND is structured around two conceptual axes that define its exploration:

1.Longitudinal – Materiality, Form, and Space

This axis presents painting as an entity in transformation, a field where matter becomes gesture, the support becomes structure, and space becomes an extension of the canvas.

•Materiality: Painting as a living substance. In these works, matter is not only the vehicle for the image, but the protagonist. The accumulation of pigment, the exploration of textures, and the tension between materials turn the surface into a territory of experimentation. Artists like Bram Bogart, Ernesto Burgos, Otis Jones, and Amanda Ziemele investigate the physicality of painting, its density, and the resistance of materials, pushing the medium to its tactile and volumetric limits.

•Form: Painting as an object. The artists gathered in BEYOND break the flatness of the canvas, expanding it, folding it, perforating it, turning it into volume. Steven Parrino, Mateo Revillo, and Martina Quesada propose pictorial structures in which form is not just a container for the image, but an element in transformation.

•Space: Painting beyond the canvas. These works expand from their own frame, intervene with architecture, interact with light, emptiness, and the environment. Richard Smith and Imi Knoebel have developed languages in which painting becomes an installation, a vibration that interacts with the surrounding space.

2.Transversal – Tradition vs. Contemporaneity

This axis draws a bridge between the history of painting and its future, between the memory of the medium and its constant reinvention.

•Heritage and rupture: BEYOND does not deny tradition but revisits and transforms it. The exploration of surface and object in the work of Mateo Revillo and Martina Quesada finds echoes in the formal and spatial experimentation that artists like Richard Smith and Imi Knoebel have historically carried out.

•Expansion of the pictorial language: In a world saturated with digital images, how does painting persist? How is it redefined when it is no longer the dominant visual language? BEYOND raises these questions through artists like Steven Parrino and Otis Jones, whose work questions the relevance of the pictorial medium in a contemporary context where the image is immaterial and fleeting.

The artists gathered in BEYOND work at the edge between tradition and rupture. They break, stretch, perforate, and expand. Through dense layers of pigment, curved canvases, industrial materials, and energetic gestures, they challenge painting as a closed medium and reveal it as a living, unstable, constantly mutating form. Their practice not only interrogates the surface but also the space that surrounds it, the air that envelops it, the architecture that contains it.

The history of painting is not a straight line, but a succession of deviations, of alternative paths, of experiments that, in many cases, were suspended in their time and now find their continuity. BEYOND is an exploration of these unfinished paths, a reactivation of gestures, ruptures, and questions that, far from closing, continue to vibrate in the present.

Each work in this exhibition is an instant of revelation, an interruption in time that invites us to look beyond, to question the limits of the visible, and to imagine what still does not exist.

Art is not a destination, but a transit. Painting is not an object, but a threshold. BEYOND confronts us with this idea, pulling us beyond the frame, beyond the form, beyond time.

Installation view BEYOND. March 2025, Courtesy of NISO, London. 

Lectura de una apirición y una huída, 2022 Pigment, paper, glass and wood 40 x 340 cm Martina Quesada

Love Child Stacy, 2022 Acrylic on brass 117.5 x 127.7 x 0.1 cm Imi Knoebel

Salon for HH, 1980 Acrylic on Canvas 167.6 x 152.4 cm Richard Smith 

Teatro, 2024 Encaustic and casein paint on cement and plasterboard, wood 120 x 480 cm Mateo Revillo 

Black with Four Circles, Two partially Hidden, 2022 Acrylic on linen on wood 76 x 68,5 x 13cm Otis Jones 

Legs of Stone, 2022 Fiberglass, resin, wood, cardboard, charcoal, oil paint 122 x 91 x 15 cm Ernesto Burgos 

Untitled, 1998 Ceramic 42 x 44 x 7 cm Bram Bogart

Untitled, 2004 Aluminium acrylic on canvas 122 x 91 x 12 cm Steven Parrino

BEYOND PRESS RELEASE.pdf

In celebration of our one-year anniversary, NISO presents 𝘉𝘌𝘠𝘖𝘕𝘋, an exhibition that challenges the boundaries of painting, transforming it into a field of expansion.

NISO

NISO

12.03—10.05.25

12.03—10.05.25

Artists

Martina Quesada

Martina Quesada

Amanda Ziemele

Amanda Ziemele

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