Fire - Twilight Contemporary Group show featuring former Colstoun Arts resident.
2024 Resident artist Angélique Nagovskaya (b. 1998, Montreal, CA) has been included in Twilight Contemporary’s upcoming exhibition ‘Fire’. The exhibition also features works from Ellie Walker, Bethany Holmes, Mengmeng Zhang, Rosalind Howdle and Joy Yamusangie, and focuses on humanity’s enduring fascination with the subject be it for sustenance or ritual
Angélique’s work Silent Glow (90 × 70 cm), painted in oil on canvas at the end of 2025, will be featured in the exhibition alongside Suspended in Motion (150 × 120 cm). Silent Glow articulates Nagovskaya’s sustained engagement with surface and symmetry, an investigation that began in earnest during her MA at the Royal College of Art with works such as Where No Wind Wanders and The Space Beyond Here. This is combined with a growing exploration of chromatic density, beginning whilst on residency at Colstoun in 2024 and evolving from the Maze works, culminating in Blue Maze and Sands of Reflection (120 × 90 cm).
Silent Night
90cm x 70cm, Oil on Canvas, 2025
The composition of Silent Glow is organised around a central vertical axis, characteristic of much of Angélique’s work, where layers of pigment accumulate into a rhythmic, almost geological formation, as though sedimentary layers are building upon one another. Deep, fire-filled reds and umbers dominate the palette, producing a visceral intensity held in check by the work’s disciplined compositional restraint. Repeated striations read as both bodily and topographical, evoking folds of flesh or scorched terrain without resolving into fixed representation.
Nagovskaya’s handling of paint is highly organised and deliberate: each mark appears pressed, dragged and compacted, generating a surface that resists optical ease and instead demands prolonged attention. Through experience, it becomes clear that deeper inspection of her maze-like compositions reveals an ever-evolving internal image, one that struggles to rationalise the subtle inconsistencies between left and right and repeatedly returns to reassess them. The painting oscillates between abstraction and imagery derived from real objects; Nagovskaya’s skill lies in her ability to render the real as unreal. While the symmetry of Silent Glow suggests a contained interiority and self-reflection, the material density of the surface unsettles any sense of closure, compelling the viewer to delve ever deeper into the work. Like fire, it captivates through sustained looking, its evolving intensity holding attention without exhaustion.
below is a gallery of works from Angélique realised since beginning her MA at the RCA
Exhibition Words from the Gallery’s website:
Twilight Contemporary is excited to announce Fire, a group show including Ellie Walker, Bethany Holmes, Mengmeng Zhang, Rosalind Howdle, Angélique Nagovskaya and Joy Yamusangie.
From the very first spark, fire has held humanity in enduring fascination. As the point of origin for human civilisation, fire illuminated the earliest acts of cooking, metallurgy, and ritual. We all hold an image of that distant, mythic night where people gathered around the flame, and primitive language gradually took shape between the interweaving of light and heat.
Heraclitus regarded fire as the primordial element through which all things come into being and pass away. Yet for him, fire was not merely physical combustion, but a philosophical figure for becoming - a continuous process of consumption, transformation, and change. The nature of fire resonates with his fundamental proposition, panta rhei (“all things flow”): existence is not a fixed entity, but an unfolding process, to be understood through movement rather than stasis. This notion finds echoes in Eastern thought as well. Daoism emphasises the fluidity and duality of all things, where mutual generation and restraint (xiang sheng xiang ke) form the underlying principle of the world’s operation.
Destruction and creation are not opposites, but different phases of the same process - just as fire destroys material even as it tempers and transforms it. The works in this exhibition are interwoven with fire as a compelling element, exploring from multiple perspectives the fluidity of existence and the possibilities of transformation. Fire is, by nature, visible yet untouchable - an immaterial presence. When introduced into the two- dimensional space of painting, it is released from its physical properties and becomes instead a field of imagination and perception. Within this space, fire is no longer bound by the logic of reality, but assumes visual forms that are open, fluid, and at times playfully unconstrained.
Words by Odile Zhao
Exhibition Details:
Location: Twilight Contemporary 378 ESSEX ROAD, LONDON, N1 3PF
Dates: 08/01/26 - 31/01/26
Gallery Opening Times: Thursday: 11 - 5:30pm, Friday: 11 - 5:30pm & Saturday: 11 - 5:30pm - Also by appointment Monday to Wednesday
