Artist: Nicholas Marschner

We are pleased to present 'Silent Running', Nicholas Marschner's first solo presentation with the gallery in London, opening on Thursday 24 April, 2025. The exhibition is accompanied by a text written by Thomas McMullan.

The figures that populate the enigmatic paintings of Nicholas Marschner (b. 1995, UK) often stand apart, like shades trapped within their own recollections. At times basked in a gauze of sunlight, at others woozily nocturnal, the mise-en-scène of these groupings share an ambiguity of time and space. Are we positioned inside or outside, within a forest or a hall of mirrors? Is the figure glimpsed through an aperture of light a lover or a mannequin in a shop window?Indeed, the featureless faces, heads often turned from the viewer, can give the impression of marionettes on a puppet stage, much like the wealthy hotel guests in Alain Resnais’ Last Year at Marienbad (1961). But with washes of colour bleeding between the human figures and their surroundings, we’re left with an impression that beneath these masks are deep, dark pools of feeling.Marschner lives and works in Berlin. This exhibition of his work is his first solo presentation with Alice Amati in London. When approaching gallery spaces, he positions his exhibitions between installation and a more traditional show of painting. Previously he has encompassed curtains or muslin dust sheets draped across walls and over unidentifiable objects. For this exhibition, undisclosed personal objects and paperwork can be found throughout the gallery, hinting that the visitor is intruding into someone's private space. The banal and mundane nature of the discarded objects scattered around the exhibition creates a direct link between the narratives unfolding within the paintings and the space in which they were created: the artist's studio — a deeply personal and lived-in environment where the artist exists whilst trying to make sense of his experience of the world.The title of the exhibition, Silent Running, relates to a machine passing into a muted state, perhaps to avoid detection. What mechanisms, we might wonder, lie in wait beneath the surface of these artworks? What processes are running outside of our awareness in the psyches of these characters?Often working with drawings in pencil and pen and several layers of cutouts, of figures and props, Marschner has the sensibility of a puppeteer, albeit one who feels the pull of his own strings by an unseen hand. The characters that populate his scenes are carefully choreographed, placed precisely here and there, but driven by emotions that seem to have an autonomy all to themselves. As he describes it to me, they are ‘like dolls or like toy soldiers they are placed in the scene and remain under the command of some other entity or drive.’This deliberate ambiguity, the purposeful gaps and elisions, ultimately make for a deeply generous narrative. Viewers are invited to step into this theatre as a participant, joining the puppets on stage, meeting their silently running minds.Text by Thomas McMullan