Nina Čelhar
After Stillness
03/09 — 17/10/2026
RAVNIKAR presents AFTER STILLNESS, a solo exhibition by Slovenian artist Nina Čelhar featuring new paintings and sculptural installations. The project grew from years of research that found a clear direction in a deceptively simple gesture: placing objects on shelves without a predetermined order. From that action, the artist builds a visual language suspended between museum logic and the porousness of daily existence.
Her arrangements borrow the codes of institutional display, with its systems of classification, while introducing the unpredictability of an inhabited setting. Food packaging might sit beside clothing, while a volume can end up next to a carefully preserved keepsake. Many of these fragments come from Nina's own surroundings and carry a personal charge that cannot be rationally explained. Dates enter quietly through the titles, which often indicate the month when a piece was conceived. The sequence therefore acquires the intimacy of a loose diary.
The show extends the artist's earlier investigation of dwelling. Previous imagery considered how architecture affects behaviour and well-being. Attention now shifts from the rooms we occupy to the possessions accumulated inside them. If a home can influence its residents, so can the contents retained over time, frequently beyond conscious awareness. Nina is drawn to inexplicable patterns of loyalty: something moved from one address to another simply because letting go feels impossible.
Limerence offers one way into this condition. Usually describing obsessive desire, the term is redirected here towards our relationship with material culture, naming an intensity that exceeds utility. Another important reference is Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi and Eugene Rochberg-Halton’s 1981 book The Meaning of Things: Domestic Symbols and the Self. Some preferences recorded in its survey feel dated today, yet the central insight continues to resonate. Kept belongings participate in the formation of identity, becoming vessels through which people understand themselves.
That proposition also clarifies the human absence within these images. No figure appears, although evidence of use is everywhere. What has been left behind acts as a trace from which an unknown person might be read. Certain silhouettes are immediately legible; others are reduced to outline. Identification is unnecessary. A familiar shape can trigger a memory, while an obscure one leaves room for invention. The artist sees this openness as part of art’s therapeutic potential, a means of reflecting on experience through responses that stay subjective.
What looks accidental is held by deliberate compositional choices, informed by her fascination with structured chaos. The process begins with objects, photographed before being translated onto cotton canvas. Every item is approached separately according to its physical character. Translucency may require one treatment, a dense surface another. Layers accumulate slowly and mistakes are difficult to correct. The result is technically complex without aiming for literal depiction. Instead, Nina seeks a convincing sense of the real, with some details remaining precise while other contours nearly disappear.
Dull green and pale blue tones establish a muted register, chosen intuitively rather than symbolically. Their restraint produces a hypnotic calm edged with unease. The three-dimensional elements deepen this atmosphere. Made from plywood, they incorporate polycarbonate panels with diffused internal illumination; their proportions correspond to those of the canvases. Light softens visibility through semi-transparent planes, turning recognition into uncertainty and giving imagination greater agency. Smaller boxes operate as supports for selected remnants, generating further associations.
Across the gallery, comfort meets the cool rigor of controlled staging. Empty intervals and sharp edges suggest distance, yet signs of ordinary handling pull the installation back towards closeness. The exhibition title names this threshold. Stillness is not an endpoint but an aftermath, the moment when movement has ceased and residue starts to speak. Its poetry lies precisely there: in the capacity of silent matter to reveal how persistently it accompanies us.
Nina Čelhar completed both her undergraduate and postgraduate studies in painting at the Academy of Fine Arts and Design in Ljubljana, where she received the Academy Award for Special Academic Achievement. As she continued to develop her artistic practice, she spent a year furthering her studies at the Hochschule für Grafik und Buchkunst in Leipzig. Her paintings, characterised by recurring motifs drawn from contemporary architecture, minimalist interiors and everyday objects, serve as a visual discourse on the profound connection between personal spaces and individual identity. Nina Čelhar has been exhibiting independently for over a decade, with solo exhibitions at Bežigrajska galerija 1 (2014), UGM Studio (2015), ZDSLU (2015), Galerija Simulaker (2016), DLUL (2017), Galerija Božidar Jakac (2017), Miklova hiša (2017), Galerija Rika Debenjaka (2018), Tessitura La Colombina (2019), 12 Star Gallery (2020), Hiša kulture Pivka (2017 and 2022), and RAVNIKAR (2018 and 2023). Her solo exhibitions have been complemented by numerous group exhibitions and art-fair presentations, including viennacontemporary and Art Verona. Through regular solo and group exhibitions both in Slovenia and internationally, her work has found its place in esteemed collections, including Albertina – ESSL and Riko.
Text by: Nicolas Vamvouklis
Supported by: Ministry of Culture & Municipality of Ljubljana
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