Nina Silverberg:Blue Hours

Composed through flat planes of rich colour, geometric forms, and replicating motifs, Silverberg’s paintings figure buildings, furniture, gloves, and books. Gesturing towards a domesticity, the artist’s works express the lived experience of the individual within a wider environment. Silverberg does not seek to represent a fixed location, rather the atmospheric qualities of the urban environment and their psychological effects. The artist renders subjects which imply a human presence, yet in their absence, she imbues her paintings with a sense of foreboding.

The exhibition’s title refers to a period of nighttime, before darkness gives way to the dawn, marked by stillness and meditation. Silverberg utilises this temporal framework as a departure point to examine perception and the interplay between obfuscation and clarity. The artist identifies a heightened sense of serenity and perception within this semi-nocturnal moment: works depicting densely packed architectures reduced to geometric grids contrast with others that represent a building in isolation, highlighting architectural details, reflecting the paradoxical notion of darkness as illumination.

Works in the exhibition act as portals – incomplete diary entries and chest of drawers pulled open to reveal buildings – operating at the border between the internal and external. The artist further dislocates reality through formal devices such as aerial perspectives and replicating motifs. Subtle shifts in repeated forms, such as checked patterns, raindrops, and rooves, infuse her work with a sense of the surreal and the uncanny. This repetition complicates the static quality of the work, to suggest a perpetual unfolding, suspending the works in a liminal realm between unconscious and conscious states.