Galerie Gregor Staiger is excited to show a new group of works on canvas and enamels in our solo presentation with Nora Turato at this year’s edition of Paris Internationale. Since our last project with the artist we’ve seen exhibitions at ICA London, the Stedelijk in Amsterdam, the Bechtler Foundation near Zurich, as well as major public commissions in Zagreb and New York. Our presentation in Paris is a progression of a new body of work first developed for a group exhibition at the Kunstmuseum Stuttgart earlier this year and marking the artist’s first series of works on canvas. The large scale works directly continue the artist’s investigation of language, while medium and technique create a very different aesthetic.

The painstaking precision from the well known enamel works, which the artist also continues to make, give way to an alternate gesture. The sharp edges of custom typefaces are replaced by just-about-legible phrases scrawled in oil stick in a loopy cursive and filling in areas with countless curlicues. Combining fragments of text with spontaneous and repetitive gestures, ideas appear in different forms and variations across the surface, with words and lines overlapping, expanding, and accumulating. Through this process, language moves beyond its conventional function and becomes a physical presence, as if the advent of LLMs requires us to reassert our bodies. The works reflect the immediacy and urgency characteristic of Turato’s practice, while leaving space for ambiguity and multiple readings.

In stark contrast, the new enamel works seem diminutive and orderly, with phrases ranging from urgent exclamations to perplexing non sequiturs in a font that is more bubbly than we’ve previously seen, slightly cartoonish even. Their vivid surfaces and concise use of text retain the immediacy and visual impact of Turato’s larger enamel works. The text becomes image: words are reduced, repeated, and placed within a highly controlled surface, creating a tension between the precision of the medium and the directness of the language.

Nora Turato, Warm Heart Long Arms, 2026
Installation view, Stiftung Kunstmuseum Stuttgart
Photo: Gerard Ulmann

Nora Turato

Nora Turato, the next big thing is YOU, 2024. Exhibition view, Galerie Gregor Staiger, Zurich