Artist: Amanda Ziemele

Text by Christian Domínguez Dietzel

NISO presents One Way or Another, a solo exhibition by Latvian artist Amanda Ziemele, whose work explores the intersection of painting, architecture, and material thought.

Known for her structural approach to colour and form, Ziemele expands her pictorial grammar into space through three interdependent works — Wavy (blue, 2024), Double Crisp (pearlescent, 2024), and Close Your Eyes (orange, 2024). Together they form a living organism, a triad of wall, air, and ground in which orientation, breath, and presence coexist in dynamic balance.

The exhibition’s title evokes this state of oscillation — a lucid equilibrium where opposing forces remain open: gravity and suspension, thought and matter, clarity and silence. Each work becomes a mode of attention. Wavy defines vision as threshold, Double Crisp suspends light as breath, and Close Your Eyes anchors perception in gravity.

Ziemele’s language of clarity connects modernist precision with contemporary awareness. Her work resonates with the chromatic intelligence of Philip Guston, the spatial restraint of Ellsworth Kelly, and the structural rigor of Imi Knoebel — a discreet genealogy where colour becomes thought and space, a living structure.

In One Way or Another, painting learns to inhabit space and thought acquires volume — a quiet architecture of consciousness where perception itself begins to breathe.

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There is a rationality that breathes. Amanda Ziemele’s practice unfolds in a territory between painting and material reflection, where each surface functions as an experiment — a visual hypothesis, a proposition of form testing how perception can think. Matter in her work behaves with intention; it organizes itself into states of tension and release. Colour acts as a vibrating field, an atmosphere where chromatic intensity meets formal clarity. Every gesture follows an intimate logic of playful precision. This structural intuition carries an organic vitality, a rhythm of awareness that turns painting into a lucid organism. Ziemele composes relationships between forms with an intelligence that refines spontaneity into coherence. Her work advances through clarity, sobriety, and a sense of quiet attention that transforms vision into structure.

At NISO, this grammar expands into architecture. ONE WAY OR ANOTHER re-reads familiar forms through a different light. Ziemele constructs a triadic organism composed of three works — Wavy (blue, 2024), Double Crisp (pearlescent, 2024), and Close Your Eyes (orange, 2024). Each plane sustains a principle: orientation, breath, and presence. Together they form a living syntax, a grammar of light and gravity written in air. The viewer walks through this syntax as both witness and participant, moving within the quiet dialogue between wall, air, and ground.

The title ONE WAY OR ANOTHER describes a condition of balance where opposite forces coexist. Direction remains open: each element moves through gravity and suspension, thought and matter, clarity and silence. Their encounter generates a state of lucid equilibrium in which reason and sensitivity weigh one another. The title thus identifies the system itself — an architecture of oscillation that holds perception in continuous attention. The exhibition breathes as a single body, sustained by presence and open to transformation.

Wavy (blue, 2024) defines orientation. Fixed to the wall, it interrupts the surface with quiet lucidity and transforms it into a threshold. Its presence recalls the perceptual tension of Richard Artschwager’s objects, in which image and material converge within a single form. Where Artschwager explored irony, Ziemele unfolds openness. The blue’s unfinished surface acts as a door toward another level — a perceptual and mental passage linking the visible with the potential. It becomes a fragment of horizon held indoors, a plane where vision begins to breathe. It connects the gravity of Close Your Eyes with the suspension of Double Crisp, establishing the interval through which the whole system circulates.

Double Crisp (pearlescent, 2024) occupies the air between wall and ground. The work acts as the exhibition’s diaphragm — the interval maintaining a continuous conversation between vision and matter. This suspended form breathes through tension, release, and rhythm. Its pearlescent hue, reminiscent of melted ice cream, carries a soft ambiguity between lilac, brown, and light, diffusing colour into atmosphere. Its spatial intelligence recalls the lineage from Lucio Fontana to Lygia Clark, where space itself becomes material and the invisible operates as a field of thought. Suspension in this sense expresses presence: an active gesture that allows the architecture to inhale. The air surrounding it gains density, becoming part of the work’s internal vibration.

Close Your Eyes (orange, 2024) completes the circuit on the floor. The piece condenses gravity into clarity, radiating a sense of weight as rhythm. Its chromatic energy evokes the structural joy of Henri Matisse — colour as breath, form as rhythm, the world distilled into coherence. If Wavy thinks and Double Crisp breathes, Close Your Eyes feels through intelligence. It gathers energy into matter, turning awareness into gravity and gravity into grace. The three works function as a living equation between perception, air, and ground. Each plane activates the others through a continuous exchange of energy and attention. The exhibition acts as a breathing architecture, a field where painting inhabits space and thought acquires volume.

Ziemele’s rationality belongs to the order of lucidity, where clarity and sensitivity unfold as a single act. Her geometry resonates through openness and precision. Within this constellation, colour operates as structure, form sustains the field, and thought expands through matter. The result is a state of silent precision — a painting that thinks through form, a space that breathes through rhythm, a world balanced between logic and grace. Within NISO, ONE WAY OR ANOTHER emerges as an instrument of thought: a curatorial organism in which wall, air, and ground translate colour into a system of perception and space into a method of consciousness. What began as surface now breathes through volume; what once gestured now builds structure. This evolution from the pictorial to the architectural expresses knowledge through form. Rationality here becomes a discipline of awareness, a way to measure the luminous space between thought and sensation.

Within the broader history of abstraction, Ziemele stands both rooted and dissonant. She draws from the constructive clarity of modernism — from Philip Guston’s embodied colour to Ellsworth Kelly’s chromatic precision and Imi Knoebel’s structural reduction — extending the ethic of precision toward an ontology of consciousness. Her Wavy carries the reflective intelligence of Artschwager’s image-objects, her Double Crisp continues the lineage from Fontana to Clark, and her Close Your Eyes evokes the luminous structurality of Matisse. These genealogies reappear as independent trajectories of thought converging quietly in her work, forming a hidden architecture of lucidity. Through them, Ziemele activates a lineage that replaces narrative with structure, emotion with resonance, and image with awareness.

Where twentieth-century abstraction constructed order, Ziemele’s generation perceives coherence. Her work aligns with the lineage that extends from LeWitt and Judd to Uta Barth and Heimo Zobernig — artists who employ form as a mode of thinking. ONE WAY OR ANOTHER joins the precision of constructive thought with the calm intensity of contemporary awareness. Seen at a distance, the three planes form a vertical chord — wall, air, ground — the triad of perception itself. Seen from within, they articulate a silent epistemology, a way of inhabiting thought through form. In the broader continuum of art history, Ziemele’s practice moves from the theatrical to the lucid, from the cosmic to the structural, from the rhetoric of wonder to the clarity of understanding. What remains is a breathing architecture of consciousness, where thought exists, still and alive, within the space of form.