19 1/4 x 14 1/8 x 3 1/8 in
The Blurry Edges of Dreams
--MONIKA GRABUSCHNIGG, NOUR MALAS.
For the first time at FRIEZE London, CARBON 12 is delighted to present the works of Monika Grabuschnigg and Nour Malas. The interplay between these artists’ works is one that oscillates between containment and release, grounding and transcendence. Their practices explore how we navigate fragility through care and memory, longing for something beyond the present. Each of their investigations, while distinct in material, converge in their attention to emotional infrastructure: what supports us, what escapes us, and what remains.
Grabuschnigg’s new works continues to explore intimate, domestic objects as monuments for vulnerability. Playing off her Single Fridge and Cold Storage series, ceramic casts of fridge doors, she evokes a surface etched with memory and emotional residue: the duvet cover. Situating the bed as both a functional object and psychological threshold, the glazed surfaces become a vessel for both comfort and alienation, casting it as a threshold between care and collapse, presence and retreat. Titles such as Held (Everything That Was Left) and Rest (The Temptation to Exist) frame these works as meditations on the emotional labor embedded in private life, where the domestic becomes an archive of touch and grief.
Malas’s recent paintings hover with fields of explosive color and are charged with mysticism and a sort of psychic drift. Navigating the emotional architectures we build to traverse fragility, her works float in a space between dream and protection. Transitioning from a more subdued, neutral palette to a vibrant, electric one, Malas’s compositions gesture toward spiritual resilience as angels, guardians, and radiant fields of color become soft shields against fear. Forming an iconography of care that is less prescriptive than intuitive, she invites viewers into a space of ambiguity and openness. Where her earlier work mapped earthly despair, she now seeks the shimmer of hope.
Both artists draw from intimate, symbolic spaces to reflect on how we endure, remember, and long for more. Positioned together, their practices offer distinct yet complementary inquiries into how we navigate a world shaped by tumult, isolation, and desire. Both engage with the psychological dimensions of everyday life - its objects, spaces, and symbolic systems - yet arrive at divergent aesthetic and conceptual registers: one grounded and tactile, the other atmospheric and intricate. In the works of Monika Grabuschnigg and Nour Malas, the domestic becomes devotional, the ordinary - sacred.
