Post-Fair

Nicola Gunnarsson’s paintings occupy a space between material memory and digital aesthetics, where abstraction is both surface and syntax. Sifting painterly language through the residues of the present; denim, pinstripe suiting and dyed linen she assembles a tactile archive of transient experience. Her work resists fixity, it dissolves into layered gestures that recall the fleeting impressions of city walks, the shimmer of artificial light, the blur of an image mid-download.

At once intimate and estranged, Gunnarsson’s practice reframes abstraction as an embodied negotiation between physicality and mediation, a site where texture, time, and meaning are continuously unmade and remade in the act of looking. Her materials fragments from everyday life, are repurposed as both surface and sign, disrupting traditional painterly hierarchies. The interplay of soft fabric and hard edge, digital glitch and gestural trace, creates a tension between touch and distance, presence and disappearance.

In this way, Gunnarsson’s paintings function as thresholds, spaces of transition where perception is in flux. Forms emerge and dissolve, hinting at memory but never fully resolving into representation. Just as a downloaded image stutters into clarity, or a reflection in a city window overlays multiple realities, her compositions suggest an unstable, ever-shifting relationship between image, material, and experience.

By embracing this instability, Gunnarsson underscores the fragility of vision itself how we see, what we remember, and the ways contemporary life shapes and fragments those impressions. Her paintings do not offer resolution but instead dwell in the in between, where abstraction becomes a language of simultaneity, contradiction, and fleeting presence.