Friday February 27, Hans Alf Gallery invites everyone to join the opening of Natasha Kissell's project room exhibition "Beautiful Light"
In Beautiful Light, Natasha Kissell presents a body of paintings that examines the subtle yet persistent dialogue between light, the natural world, and modern architecture. The works attend closely to the movement of sunlight across surfaces of glass, concrete, and steel, revealing how illumination transforms materials typically associated with rigidity and permanence. Through these shifting effects, architecture is softened and re-situated within a broader environmental continuum. Buildings are not treated as static or monumental forms; instead, they emerge as responsive, living surfaces—continually reshaped by changing light, weather conditions, and surrounding landscapes.
Nature, in these paintings, is not a passive backdrop but an active and generative presence. It appears reflected in panes of glass, filtered through shadow, or gently pressing against constructed forms. Kissell employs color, line, and simplified geometry to evoke transient states of perception: the calm of early morning light, the warmth of dusk, the crystalline cold of snow-covered mountains, and the stillness that exists between movement and rest. These moments suggest a heightened attentiveness to time, atmosphere, and the fragility of lived experience.
“I am drawn to the promise of adventure” as the artist reflects, “the terror of the unknown and the risks of the alpinist who sets off leaving home but always there is the home to come back to, a sense of belonging and safety to return to, to make the journey worth the toil and the fear”.
Underlying this visual inquiry is the artist’s attraction to the promise of adventure and the tension inherent in the unknown. Kissell references the psychological and physical risks faced by the alpinist—who departs from the familiarity of home toward uncertainty and potential danger. Yet equally present is the idea of return: the enduring pull of belonging, shelter, and safety that gives meaning to the journey itself. This oscillation between exposure and refuge, fear and reassurance, mirrors the broader themes of the exhibition, situating human aspiration within both the vastness of nature and the intimate structures we build to then call home.
