Artists

Christine Nguyen, Danielle Riede

Press release

BASEL, SWITZERLAND – 532 Gallery Thomas Jaeckel is pleased to present Dreamcurrents, an exhibition of new work by Christine Nguyen and new and recent paintings by Danielle Riede. Nguyen’s photobased paintings explore spiritual and symbolic relationships between nocturnal creatures, aquatic landscapes, and cycles of transformation in the natural world. Layered imagery, salt crystals, and 22k gold leaf create dreamlike environments where nature becomes mystical and contemplative. Owls, moths, snakes, lotus flowers, and water lilies recur as symbols of intuition, metamorphosis, renewal, and the unknown. Salt crystals grown directly onto the works evoke preservation, memory, and nature’s alchemical forces. Dragonflies and lunar phases introduce celestial elements, suggesting illumination and cyclical change. Together, these luminous ecosystems invite viewers into spaces of wonder, reflection, and reverence for the living world. Riede’s oil paintings begin in the body. A lifelong dancer, she uses gesture as a brush: a movement is made in space, then recorded in paint so the canvas becomes a record of time passing through the figure. The resulting fields—rhythmic, mineral, tidal—hold both energy and stillness. Stones, strata, tree rings and open water surface as afterimages rather than as subjects. In the related Ocean Womb pictures, the sea is treated as a generative realm: birth, sensuality, mystery, and the long duration of living forms. Shown together, Nguyen and Riede form luminous currents of transformation. Alchemical gold and crystalline salt meet embodied strata and geological memory; celestial dreamspaces meet terrestrial depth; nocturnal symbols meet the slow record of the body in time.