7–29 November 2025 | Aleph Contemporary, Stroud
“There is a haunting if deceptive modernity in the notion… that arteries and the branches of trees, the dancing motion of the microcosm and the solemn measures of the spheres… are all ciphers.”
— George Steiner, Lifelines
Some artists paint to impose order on the world. Nadia Ryzhakova paints to uncover the order that was there all along — quiet, hidden, almost breathing beneath the surface. In Ciphers of Nature, her new solo exhibition at Aleph Contemporary, the artist traces that subtle pulse: the invisible geometries that govern everything from the veins of a leaf to the migration of thought.
Ryzhakova’s process begins not with an image but with surrender. She pours paint in liquid veils, letting pigment flow and fuse in ways that resist prediction. The resulting marbled strata recall both geological formation and biological growth — as if time itself were pooling on the canvas. Only later, when the turbulence begins to settle, does Ryzhakova intervene: coaxing from the eddies of colour the glimmers of figures and stories that hover between recognition and dream.
Her paintings inhabit a rare state of suspension — that instant before chaos resolves into clarity. Children often appear within these shifting worlds, tiny explorers moving through oceans of colour. They are the witnesses, perhaps, to nature’s quiet intelligence: the Li of Chinese philosophy, the rhythm that forms the veins of a leaf or the grain of wood, beauty that emerges without coercion.
The effect is mesmerising. One is drawn into a landscape that is neither abstract nor figurative, but ecological — alive with correspondences. The paint behaves like weather, like thought, like memory; it seeps, evaporates, and leaves behind fossils of emotion. Each work is a fragment of the universe learning to describe itself.
Ryzhakova’s fascination with emergence — with form arising from flux — is not theoretical. Trained in Monumental Arts at Moscow’s Stroganov Academy, she later moved to London, where her early experiments in digital drawing earned her features in the Evening Standard and on Sky News, as well as a collaboration with the Victoria & Albert Museum. Yet it was the return to paint, to its unruly physics, that brought her home. In 2016 she won the John Palmer Painting Competition and, most recently, completed the Turps Correspondence Course, a crucible for painters seeking fresh language within traditional mediums.
Today she works from her studio in Painswick, at the edge of the Cotswolds, where light and weather are constant collaborators. There, surrounded by the undulating hills and the low, geological patience of stone, she continues to test the boundaries between accident and intention.
In Ciphers of Nature, Ryzhakova offers not simply paintings but propositions — meditations on the way patterns repeat, scale, and fold across dimensions. It is an exhibition of revelation rather than display, where chaos becomes a teacher and paint a philosopher.
“The fluid moment,” she says, “is never entirely mine to control.”
Perhaps that is the secret beauty of her work: it trusts the world to paint itself.
Ciphers of Nature
7–29 November 2025
Aleph Contemporary, New Imperial House, Station Road, Stroud, GL5 3AR
Open Fridays & Saturdays 10 am–4 pm, or by appointment
