Kyara van Meel

In Kyara van Meel’s work, the body takes centre stage: her own body serves as an instrument for creating her paintings and drawings, while the female body serves as inspiration for her visual language. Van Meel closely observes forms derived from her own body, expansive landscapes, or the transformation of fruits and flowers found in nature. She translates these form studies into abstracted compositions where subject and environment merge. At the anthroposophical primary school, Van Meel learned not to work from basic shapes and colours toward a final form, but to comprehend how life emerges within the cosmic order. This process of continuous movement and transformation is still evident in her paintings, drawings, and prints. The colours and patterns that emerge in her work evoke the intuitive drawings and sketches made by af Klint and her colleagues of Den Fem (The Five). Guided by their spiritual guides, af Klint and her peers ‘automatically’ filled the paper with their hands and arms, often resulting in intriguing shapes and hypnotic lines.

For this exhibition, Kyara van Meel has been invited to create a charcoal wall drawing inspired by the automatic drawing technique she has practised in recent years. Van Meel produced various charcoal drawings for her graduation project in 2022 at the Royal Academy of Fine Arts in The Hague, where she consistently generated a dizzying interplay of lines starting from a single basic shape. She also worked on a life-sized scale, using both arms and hands simultaneously on a single sheet of paper.

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Cycle, Portal, Path

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This fall, Nest presents Cycle, Portal, Path: an exhibition that examines how the traces left by the Swedish artist Hilma af Klint (1862-1944) affect contemporary art 100 years later. Af Klint lived in a time full of developments and scientific turmoil. Scientists studied nature and dealt with phenomena such as atomic fission and X-rays; discoveries that shaped the world and made the invisible visible.

Cycle, Portal, Path shows that Af Klint’s exploration of the relationship between science, nature and spiritual life is as urgent now as it was in her time. The artists in the exhibition relate directly or indirectly to Af Klint and her views and supplement them with contemporary or futuristic ideas. Through meditative drawings and video installations, abstract paintings and AI-generated images, the artists reflect on new technologies, spiritual movements, ecology and the connection between then, now and future generations.

Cycle, Portal, Path was created in conversation with Kunstmuseum Den Haag and KM21, where the exhibitions Hilma af Klint and Piet Mondriaan: Forms of Life and Tai Shani – Our Hieromantic Objects of Love will be on view simultaneously. A diverse context program has been developed for the three exhibitions. Keep an eye on our website for updates.

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