Nadja Kabriel

Says Nadja Kabriel of her work, “I believe painting can remove the 'veils' that prevent us from seeing. And by 'veils' I mean the bombardment of information and stimuli designed to demand and occupy our attention. My inspiration for a painting comes when I see in a new light objects that I normally walk past unnoticed. By painting them from this new perspective I return myself to reality. I can feel the familiar timelessness of a jam jar, a bar of soap or some bobby pins sitting on the table, the thoughtful designs of fabrics that make our homes warm, my reflection in a mirror or the extraordinary forms and patterns that occur in nature. As humans we are always trying to make sense of our place and deal with the truth of our mortal position in the world, so by paying attention, my primary objective is to return myself to reality, to the present, to something that will make us feel connected and at home."

Kabriel is an artist whose practice uses still life to interrogate the systems of value assigned to women’s domestic and bodily experience. Working in oil, she places objects with little to no history of painterly representation alongside subjects governed by centuries of pictorial convention, principally flowers. This juxtaposition exposes the selective logic of the still life tradition: what has been deemed worthy of representation, and what has been excluded as too private, too bodily, or too ordinary.