In a cultural moment marked by volatility and accelerated change, the act of seeking out beauty has regained a quiet urgency. Nino Mier Gallery is pleased to present the persistence of beauty, a group exhibition bringing together thirty contemporary artists whose practices engage landscape and still life not as nostalgic genres, but as enduring frameworks for reflection, emotional grounding, and visual pleasure. These works propose beauty as something powerful— capable of absorbing the pressures of the present while offering clarity, perspective, and the joy to forge a path forward.
That beauty should perform this work is not a new idea. Friedrich Schiller, writing in the turbulent aftermath of the French Revolution, argued that art and beauty were the key through which a fragmented humanity might rediscover a shared morality and recover wholeness. In a related vein, Kant famously proposed that a genuine experience of beauty indicates that what moves one ought to move everyone, thus a catalyst for connection and community. It is a conviction the works in this exhibition seem to share, each arriving at it through its own distinct approach and across a remarkable range of practices. From oil to marble dust, works on paper to bronze sculpture, this exhibition is an inquiry into the power of beauty in all of its myriad manifestations.
As part of the exhibition’s intentionally generous and restorative experience, the natural splendor of the world is celebrated through landscapes, still lifes, and sculptures. The warm, abstract terrains of Tim Braden feel almost like fever dreams in contrast with the precision of James Chroniser’s desaturated, snow-laden trees. Yet the works of both invite moments of quiet reflection, even reverence, much like with Andy Mister or Yves Scherer. Beauty is often also adorned in its simplicity. Consider the aluminum cast clouds of Olaf Breuning, or the microscopic studies of butterfly wings by Imogen Allen, both finding in the very small and the very expansive the same quality of arrested wonder. Inversely, the bucolic scenes of the late Stephen Pace transmute the mundane: be it a woman strolling her home in the nude, or one of his trademark horses racing against a vast blue sky, everyday backdrops are granted gravitas under Pace’s energetic and gestural brushtrokes.
No study on beauty is complete without a thesis on florals, and the artists of this exhibition faithfully supply a number of interpretations. Jorge Galindo’s Sacramonte flowers are lush and sensuous, whereas Ethan Cook’s free-form, handwoven blossoms invite a sense of playfulness. Gerlind Zeilner softly strips greenery down to its anatomical parts in the vein of Enlightenment era botanical illustrations, while Larissa Borteh’s florals are so lightly smeared as to barely be tethered to reality. Rachael Catherine Anderson’s ethereal pieces feel as though they are bursting out of the canvas, rejecting memento mori and Earthly limitations. Conversely, Tuesday Riddle opens a keyhole into a forest floor, using the contrast of glowing gold leaf against rich dark paint to marvel in the organic cycles of life and death. And Tony Matelli's bronze sculptures — “weeds” literally spurting through manufactured gaps in the gallery floors— consider the beauty in that which is ordinary and overlooked.
Finally, several artists engage with the concept of beauty as an intangible, transient experience. In the tradition of Impressionism, Carole Ebtinger’s pastels on paper are less the description of a setting than the evocation of a feeling, like the serenity when one happens to stand in just the right spot as the sunlight breaks through the trees. Angiola Gatti similarly speaks through light and atmosphere, creating luminous horizons using ballpoint pens that define space and time through color. Similar to Jingge Dong or Ninka Skhirelli, these artists immerse the viewer in a sensation, an infinitesimally specific moment of beauty.
Altogether, the thirty artists which make up this exhibition propose beauty not as a unified aesthetic position but as a shared commitment to craft, to living in states of admiration, and to the marriage of observation and feeling. While attentive to the complexities of the current world, the exhibition strongly resists pessimism. Instead, in a world where images of crisis arrive faster than the mind can comprehend, it affirms the role of art as a stabilizing force: a space where form, color, and perception might restore balance.
Whether beauty resides in the eye of the beholder, as the self-disclosing work of an artist like Francesca DiMatteo or Lola Gil might suggest, or in the objective splendor of the world around us, is a question the exhibition deliberately leaves open. The aim here is not to define one of the most elusive concepts in human experience, but to insist that we seek it out wherever it may appear, and especially now.
Participating artists:
Imogen Allen
Rachael Catharine Anderson
Christopher Astley
Larissa Broth
Olaf Breuning
James Chronister
Ethan Cook
Francesca DiMattio
Jingge Dong
Carole Ebtinger
Jorge Galindo
Leah Glenn
Gregory Hodge
Tony Matelli
Lauren Messelian
Andy Mister
David Moy
Danny Moynihan
Estate of Stephen Pace
Tuesday Riddell
Yves Scherer
Ninka Skhiereli
Mònica Subidé
Noelia Towers
Gerlind Zeilner