10 march 2026, Yves Joris
Anne Griffiths & Johannes Nagel at NQ Gallery
The die was already cast before your hand was raised
Ceramics again, I thought, the sort of thing for the hallway in a notary's office or the window of a design shop in a gentrified hipster neighbourhood. It is applied art and the word 'applied' sounds suspiciously like 'rejected'. But when I saw the work of Johannes Nagel, I fell silent for an entire minute, which for me, is the equivalent of a standing ovation.
What brought about that silence only became clear later when I began to consider the exhibition at NQ Gallery alongside the other exhibition. What at first appeared to be an isolated experience — an encounter with porcelain that seems intent on leading a life of its own — later turned out to be part of a larger conversation. Two solo exhibitions, not a duo, yet still an unspoken dialogue: Johannes Nagel in the main space and Anne Griffiths in the Helen Frankenthaler Room. Two titles that could easily create a philosophy of their own: The Die Is Cast and Beaver Trail. The die cast, alea iacta est, is said to have been declared by Julius Caesar when crossing the Rubicon at the moment when decision and destiny converged. Place them side by side and you get a meditation on gesture, trace and the question of whether we ever truly decide.
Johannes Nagel, Pendant 2, 2025, NQ Gallery
The vessel that serves no purpose
Nagel, who was born in Jena, trained in Quebec and ultimately settled in Halle, Germany, makes vases that are not vases. Or rather, he creates objects that fall into the category of 'vase', only to dismantle this from within. The objects are finished — the porcelain glazed and fired with a beginning and an end — but everything in between refuses to behave. Seams remain visible, cuts are raw, shapes tilt into a precarious balance that seems perpetually on the verge of collapse. According to the artist himself, he rarely thought about vases when creating them. And that's a good thing because flowers would capitulate here immediately.
His technique is unusual enough to require a brief detour. Nagel digs cavities in sand, fills them with liquid clay and lets the excess drain away. What remains clings to the inner wall, forming a thin-walled sculptural shell: the imprint of a void. It is an almost philosophical action: you are not making a form, but the negative space of a form visible. The holes are the discovery. The hole is the work.
Standing before these pieces, you realise how little an object actually needs to remain an object. Only a memory of its contour, an echo of functionality, a suspicion of what it was once meant to hold. The rest can simply disappear. What remains is something that feels both archaic and radically contemporary: a vessel that serves no purpose and is therefore finally free.
American curator and author Glenn Adamson once described Nagel's work as a triadic ballet, a subtle dance between Japanese ceramic tradition (the imperfect perfection of a teacup), Bauhaus rationalism (clear silhouettes, geometric discipline) and finally, the dramatic intensity of Californian Abstract Expressionism. That sounds like theory, but in the gallery, it becomes experience. The work does not appear assembled, but organically grown, as if the influences themselves had forgotten where they came from.
Elsewhere, Nagel's relationship to the vase has been compared to Isa Genzken's relationship to architecture: a sculpture that cites its reference only to simultaneously undermine it. That is precisely what is happening here. A Nagel object has the outline of a pot, the scale of a pot, the context of a pot — yet behaves like a sculpture that has somehow ended up inside that pot and refuses to leave. The functional shell remains as memory, as the viewer's last point of orientation until that, too, dissolves. I walked around the same piece twice before I understood this and a third time because I did not want to let it go.
Johannes Nagel, movement/cut #25 blue/blue, 2025, NQ Gallery
Fossils of movement
In the main space stands Nagel — or rather, his objects, as the artist himself has long since departed. What he has left behind are porcelain sculptures that began as a gesture: a tunnel dug in sand, a movement of the hand, a temporary decision that now exists as an imprint. Not the gesture itself, but its negative. Not the action, but the proof that it once occurred — and even that proof is uncertain.
The word that keeps returning, both in texts about him and in his own writing, is Stegreif (off the cuff). Yet improvisation here does not mean carelessness. It is a discipline. "Hands learn quickly," Nagel says, "and innocence disappears just as quickly." For that reason, he continually forces himself into unfamiliar combinations: tunnels crossing one another, plaster planes slicing through amorphous forms, glazes blending historical references as if he were running the entire history of ceramics through a blender.
The surfaces complicate matters even further. Nagel treats them as terrain on which negotiations take place after the fact: spray paint, tape, brush. Sometimes, the finish appears to be an attempt to correct the gesture. Other times, it seems to confirm it. Perhaps that is their honesty; that they never seem entirely finished. I stood before them thinking, this is what a studio leaves behind when it falls silent.
Anne Griffiths, Glim, 2025, NQ Gallery
Beaver in the leading role
Then there is the Helen Frankenthaler Room, where the work of Anne Griffiths hangs. Griffiths grew up on the west coast of Canada and now works from Victoria, a place where forest, water and light constantly merge. Her path to painting was less linear than might be expected: as a child, she took classes at the Vancouver Art Gallery, later studied at Emily Carr University, but then spent years pursuing a career as an art director before finally returning to painting.
You can still feel that detour. Her work carries a sense of design discipline, yet also memory and intuition — as though each painting were a second attempt to understand something that had already been seen.
Beaver Trail follows the track a beaver leaves through a forest: not random, but not planned the way an architect plans. The beaver follows water, resistance, slope, the internal logic of the terrain. It makes a path because it must go somewhere and only afterwards does the path exist as something that seems to have always been there.
Griffiths' paintings follow a similar logic. She does not begin with composition, but with presence: repeatedly visiting the same place, slowly registering atmospheric shifts, allowing a landscape to reveal itself only gradually. According to the artist, her paintings often begin in memory rather than observation. She deliberately works without reference material in order to keep discovery alive.
On her website, she quotes Rainer Maria Rilke: "These trees are magnificent, but even more magnificent is the sublime and moving space between them, as though with their growth it too increased." It is a sentence that almost literally describes her paintings. For what Griffiths paints are rarely the trees themselves, but the space between them: the breath, the distance, the slow expansion of air and light that appears when you look long enough. Her canvases consist — just as with Nagel — of what is not there. Or rather, of what only becomes visible when you learn to look at the in-between.
Griffiths does not paint places. She paints a return. Her canvases show landscapes of British Columbia that are not spectacular, but present: shifting light, air that acquires weight, trees that simply remain standing. She paints them again and again, not to document them, but to disappear into them. Her palette is rich yet restrained: deep greens, muted blues, earth and mist tones that move humbly across the canvas. Her brushwork remains discreet, almost reticent, as if unwilling to disturb the silence of the landscape.
What distinguishes her work from overall contemporary landscape painting is that it does not limit itself to image. It is a form of memory without anecdote, of registration without the urge for proof. You sense how each painting emerges from a series of earlier glances; how it does not fix a single moment, but gathers an accumulation of moments. In that sense, Griffiths paints less what she sees than what she continues to see.
Anne Griffiths, As Time Floats By, 2025, NQ Gallery
What they allow each other to say
Placed beside one another, they say something neither could say alone. Nagel celebrates the moment when gesture solidifies. Griffiths follows a trail that existed before she arrived. One shows decision as object, the other the path as memory.
Together they shift the notion of freedom. Not as a choice made in the moment, but as something that only becomes visible afterwards — like a track you notice only once you stop walking. Perhaps we rarely decide at the moment we believe we do. Perhaps we merely discover what we have long been doing already.
