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—who think through gesture, color, material, and historical awareness. Our program is guided by three core principles, woven into a curatorial approach that is precise, attentive, and rigorous: (I) supporting artists with distinctive voices; (II) bringing renewed attention to overlooked trajectories; (III) fostering meaningful dialogues between works, languages, and generations.

(I) Discovery: We are committed to emerging artists who work with evolving visual languages and a sharp formal sensibility. We seek voices that, through visual intensity, raise new questions and expand the scope of contemporary artistic practice.

(II) Critical Recovery: We revisit significant yet neglected paths in art history—works that speak to the present and deserve to be re-examined through fresh perspectives. This approach is grounded in a reflective reading of the past, oriented toward transformation.

(III) Intergenerational Dialogues: We connect artists across generations and geographies, activating productive tensions and shared sensibilities. Rather than searching for stylistic similarity, we look for converging concerns—stories that resonate across Time and challenge how we see and understand Art today.

Together, these principles form the foundation of our work and the heart of our activity: a way of thinking through art with curatorial precision, openness, and care. 

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

Bridging Art History with Contemporary Practice. 

Born in 1996 in Tokyo, Japan, Sawako Nasu’s work resides in a space of radical subtlety.

In her painting, nothing is narrated — and yet everything remains.

She does not represent, adorn, or declare. She holds.

Like a threshold. Like a form of listening.

Her practice unfolds in the most delicate —and yet most demanding— register of gesture:

that which barely appears, yet transforms.

What seems minimal is, in truth, structure.

Sawako does not seek an image: she cultivates presence.

Her surfaces contain no focal point —and this is no accident.

She chooses familiar motifs —landscapes or portraits emptied of specificity—

not to tell a story, but to dust off its remnants.

What remains is a lucid trace. A form of care.

There is an ethic of attention in her work.

A fidelity to inner time, not to external rhythm.

Nothing asks to be looked at —and yet everything holds us.

form becomes vibration, painting becomes a quiet stance in the world.

This tension between fragility and structure, presence and disappearance,

has its roots in a long dialogue between the frame and the world — 

a reflection shaped over years of exchange with the Japanese painter Masato Kobayashi, 

and one that subtly connects her to a lineage of artists who sought not to express, but to hold space.

At NISO, the presence of Sawako Nasu brings both balance and a signal:

that painting can still be a site of radical contemplation.

A silence swept each morning, like sand around a stone. 

Landscape n.1, 2024   120 x 170 cm   Oil on Canvas

Landscape n.2, 2024   80 x 100 cm   Oil on Canvas

Landscape n.3, 2024   56 x 74 cm   Oil on Canvas

Landscape n.4, 2024   56 x 71 cm   Oil on Canvas

Landscape n.5, 2024   56 x 71 cm   Oil on Canvas

Landscape n.6, 2024   56 x 71 cm   Oil on Canvas

Installation view of Vestige, NISO, London, September 2024.

Portrait of A Man n.1, 2024   50 x 41 cm   Oil on Canvas 

Portrait of A Man n.2, 2024   40 x 31 cm   Oil on Canvas 

Portrait of A Man n.3, 2024   40 x 31 cm   Oil on Canvas 

Portrait of A Man n.4, 2024   40 x 31 cm   Oil on Canvas 

Portrait of A Man n.5, 2024   40 x 31 cm   Oil on Canvas 

Portrait of A Man n.6, 2024   40 x 31 cm   Oil on Canvas 

Portrait of A Man n.7, 2024   40 x 31 cm   Oil on Canvas 

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

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

Double Crisp, 2024 Oil on Canvas 260 x 206cm 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

There is a rationality that breathes. Amanda Ziemele’s practice unfolds in a territory between painting and material reflection, where each surface functions as an experiment — a visual hypothesis, a proposition of form testing how perception can think. Matter in her work behaves with intention; it organizes itself into states of tension and release. Colour acts as a vibrating field, an atmosphere where chromatic intensity meets formal clarity. Every gesture follows an intimate logic of playful precision. This structural intuition carries an organic vitality, a rhythm of awareness that turns painting into a lucid organism. Ziemele composes relationships between forms with an intelligence that refines spontaneity into coherence. Her work advances through clarity, sobriety, and a sense of quiet attention that transforms vision into structure.

At NISO, this grammar expands into architecture. ONE WAY OR ANOTHER re-reads familiar forms through a different light. Ziemele constructs a triadic organism composed of three works — Wavy (blue, 2024), Double Crisp (pearlescent, 2024), and Close Your Eyes (orange, 2024). Each plane sustains a principle: orientation, breath, and presence. Together they form a living syntax, a grammar of light and gravity written in air. The viewer walks through this syntax as both witness and participant, moving within the quiet dialogue between wall, air, and ground.

The title ONE WAY OR ANOTHER describes a condition of balance where opposite forces coexist. Direction remains open: each element moves through gravity and suspension, thought and matter, clarity and silence. Their encounter generates a state of lucid equilibrium in which reason and sensitivity weigh one another. The title thus identifies the system itself — an architecture of oscillation that holds perception in continuous attention. The exhibition breathes as a single body, sustained by presence and open to transformation.

Wavy (blue, 2024) defines orientation. Fixed to the wall, it interrupts the surface with quiet lucidity and transforms it into a threshold. Its presence recalls the perceptual tension of Richard Artschwager’s objects, in which image and material converge within a single form. Where Artschwager explored irony, Ziemele unfolds openness. The blue’s unfinished surface acts as a door toward another level — a perceptual and mental passage linking the visible with the potential. It becomes a fragment of horizon held indoors, a plane where vision begins to breathe. It connects the gravity of Close Your Eyes with the suspension of Double Crisp, establishing the interval through which the whole system circulates.

Double Crisp (pearlescent, 2024) occupies the air between wall and ground. The work acts as the exhibition’s diaphragm — the interval maintaining a continuous conversation between vision and matter. This suspended form breathes through tension, release, and rhythm. Its pearlescent hue, reminiscent of melted ice cream, carries a soft ambiguity between lilac, brown, and light, diffusing colour into atmosphere. Its spatial intelligence recalls the lineage from Lucio Fontana to Lygia Clark, where space itself becomes material and the invisible operates as a field of thought. Suspension in this sense expresses presence: an active gesture that allows the architecture to inhale. The air surrounding it gains density, becoming part of the work’s internal vibration.

Close Your Eyes (orange, 2024) completes the circuit on the floor. The piece condenses gravity into clarity, radiating a sense of weight as rhythm. Its chromatic energy evokes the structural joy of Henri Matisse — colour as breath, form as rhythm, the world distilled into coherence. If Wavy thinks and Double Crisp breathes, Close Your Eyes feels through intelligence. It gathers energy into matter, turning awareness into gravity and gravity into grace. The three works function as a living equation between perception, air, and ground. Each plane activates the others through a continuous exchange of energy and attention. The exhibition acts as a breathing architecture, a field where painting inhabits space and thought acquires volume.

Ziemele’s rationality belongs to the order of lucidity, where clarity and sensitivity unfold as a single act. Her geometry resonates through openness and precision. Within this constellation, colour operates as structure, form sustains the field, and thought expands through matter. The result is a state of silent precision — a painting that thinks through form, a space that breathes through rhythm, a world balanced between logic and grace. Within NISO, ONE WAY OR ANOTHER emerges as an instrument of thought: a curatorial organism in which wall, air, and ground translate colour into a system of perception and space into a method of consciousness. What began as surface now breathes through volume; what once gestured now builds structure. This evolution from the pictorial to the architectural expresses knowledge through form. Rationality here becomes a discipline of awareness, a way to measure the luminous space between thought and sensation.

Within the broader history of abstraction, Ziemele stands both rooted and dissonant. She draws from the constructive clarity of modernism — from Philip Guston’s embodied colour to Ellsworth Kelly’s chromatic precision and Imi Knoebel’s structural reduction — extending the ethic of precision toward an ontology of consciousness. Her Wavy carries the reflective intelligence of Artschwager’s image-objects, her Double Crisp continues the lineage from Fontana to Clark, and her Close Your Eyes evokes the luminous structurality of Matisse. These genealogies reappear as independent trajectories of thought converging quietly in her work, forming a hidden architecture of lucidity. Through them, Ziemele activates a lineage that replaces narrative with structure, emotion with resonance, and image with awareness.

Where twentieth-century abstraction constructed order, Ziemele’s generation perceives coherence. Her work aligns with the lineage that extends from LeWitt and Judd to Uta Barth and Heimo Zobernig — artists who employ form as a mode of thinking. ONE WAY OR ANOTHER joins the precision of constructive thought with the calm intensity of contemporary awareness. Seen at a distance, the three planes form a vertical chord — wall, air, ground — the triad of perception itself. Seen from within, they articulate a silent epistemology, a way of inhabiting thought through form. In the broader continuum of art history, Ziemele’s practice moves from the theatrical to the lucid, from the cosmic to the structural, from the rhetoric of wonder to the clarity of understanding. What remains is a breathing architecture of consciousness, where thought exists, still and alive, within the space of form.

Amanda_Ziemele_Press_Release_compressed.pdf

NISO is thrilled to present One Way or Another, a solo exhibition by Latvian artist Amanda Ziemele, whose work explores the intersection of painting, architecture, and material thought.

NISO

NISO

12.11—20.12.25

12.11—20.12.25

Artists

Sawako Nasu

Sawako Nasu

Amanda Ziemele

Amanda Ziemele

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