Artists

Nina Silverberg

Press release

Coulisse Gallery is proud to present Yours Truly by Nina Silverberg, her first solo exhibition at the gallery. The exhibition marks a departure from Silverberg’s previous work, turning her focus to letters and letter writing. Featuring eleven small-scale paintings of envelopes and open sheets of paper, painted entirely in deep shades of blue, the works continue Silverberg’s exploration of night-time and its quiet, suspended hours. Yours Truly is concerned less with what a letter might say than with the act of addressing itself. An envelope implies a sender and a recipient; a house suggests an address; a thread traces a line between two points. Silverberg leaves each of these forms incomplete. The letters contain no words, only empty paper, simple silhouettes of buildings and falling raindrops. By removing language, she leaves the paintings open to the viewer’s own associations, memories and thoughts. There is something being addressed, but its message remains unknown. Silverberg’s starting point is the physical experience of the letter: finding an old folded piece of paper in a pocket, or reopening a letter years after it was received and kept in a box. Such objects carry traces of time. Before it is opened, its contents are withheld, the letter contains a particular kind of anticipation. This new body of work explores both the container and the contained: the envelope and the folded letter within. Opened and flattened, the envelope takes on the appearance of a small house, its pointed flap forming a roof-like structure. Inside, the letter remains folded, its creases dividing the paper into four fields of alternating light and darkness. The folds conceal as much as they reveal, creating a space between what is visible and what remains hidden. The house, recurring throughout Silverberg’s practice, is similarly reduced to its most recognisable form. Rather than depicting a particular place, it becomes a fragment of an imagined or remembered space: somewhere one might have lived, returned to, left behind or simply imagined. This sense of the house as a vessel for memory and inner life recalls Gaston Bachelard’s understanding of domestic space in The Poetics of Space, where rooms, houses and corners become repositories for intimate experience and imagination. In Silverberg’s paintings, the house is not so much a setting as a psychological image, carrying the possibility of belonging as well as distance. Across its folds, Silverberg places motifs that have appeared throughout her earlier work, bringing familiar images into a new context. Folded paper, becomes a vessel for memory and possibility. They become fragments of a visual language, carried within the letter rather than written upon it. Like memories themselves, they are recognisable without necessarily belonging to a fixed narrative. A repeated line of red text runs through the exhibition: yours truly. The phrase gives the exhibition its title and introduces a sense of address without identifying either sender or recipient. It also recalls the red thread given by Ariadne to Theseus in Greek mythology, guiding him through the labyrinth and allowing him to find his way back. Here, the thread is not an overtly romantic gesture, but something more ambiguous: a line of connection, continuity and possibility. Against the deep blue of the paintings, the red thread becomes a quiet interruption. It passes behind the works, connecting them without resolving their silences. Like the letters themselves, it suggests that something can remain present even when its destination, meaning or recipient is uncertain. Through simplified images of letters, houses and rain, she creates settings rather than fixed narratives: spaces where memory, longing, distance and connection can coexist. Yours Truly leaves the correspondence open, allowing the viewer to become, in a sense, its recipient.