Nadia Gyr

Exhibition in ALARM

Nadia Gyr composes all her egg tempera paints herself. Every colour is unique, every hue invented afresh. In her work each body of water, every strip of sea shimmers in a different light and the very unique colouring is one of the many things that sets Gyr’s paintings apart.

She is from Switzerland and has lived in Amsterdam for over 30 years.

In her panel paintings she creates calm surfaces of colour, which seem to glow from within. She uses an all-over structure known primarily in relation to the Abstract Expressionists of the sixties (such as Barnett Newman, Mark Rothko, Jackson Pollock). This structure leads the eye beyond the edge of the picture and points to the unpainted, rendering significant that which lies beyond. Her paintings often have something of “a slice of infinity” about them, which of course rather lends itself to Gyr’s favourite subject, the sea.

The paintings appear more impressionistic than realistic – reality here is more felt than copied. Confronting the objectively recorded reality is a subjective one, in which traces back to the documentary approach can nevertheless be found. Yet the artist does not take herself too seriously; it is as if she submerged herself in her subject matter, absorbing the water, the sky. The pictures exude a feeling of generous expansiveness, of something larger than the self, which is commonly seen more in the work of American than European painters and which is reminiscent of romantic traditions.