Nicholas Marschner: Silent Running

25 Apr-31 May 2025

PV 24 Apr 2025, 6-8pm

Overview

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 in the UK. 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, discarded letters between two unnamed characters can be found throughout the space, hinting at dynamics that are never fully disclosed. Are these characters to be found in the canvases? Have they inhabited this fictional space long before any viewer has set foot in the gallery? 

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