Nikola Irmer is a graduate of Hunter College, New York and Glasgow School of Art and attended the San Francisco Art Institute. She has exhibited extensively in Europe and the US and her work was included in dOCUMENTA 13, Worldly House, curated by Tue Greenfort.
Other selected exhibitions at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Stift Admont, AT, Haus der Natur, Salzburg, AT, Kunstraum Kreuzlingen, CH, Camberwell Space, London UK, Kunstverein Konstanz, DE, Schlossmuseum Friedenstein Gotha, Mewo Kunsthalle, Memmingen, DE
Rooted in quiet observation and driven by a lifelong affinity with animals, my work examines the complex and often contradictory ways we relate to the natural world. Trained as a painter and informed by years of living between cultures in the US and Europe my practice focuses on the entanglement of empathy, extinction, and aesthetics within natural history collections.
The imagery I work with grows out of long-term, sustained engagement. This includes months of drawing and painting in museums, conversations with curators, and ongoing research into animal studies, natural history, and collecting practices. Visits to collections across Florence, Vienna, Paris, New York Oxford and Washington D.C.—have shaped not only the content of my work, but its ethical position.
I work primarily with oil paint. Its materiality is inseperable from touch, and touch, alongside color, is central to my process. I often spend months on a single painting, remaining acutely aware of how formal decisions around scale, mark - making, and space carry ethical weight when the subject is a non human animal.
Across a series, animals may gradually disappear from one painting to the next, a slow vanishing that echoes the abstraction of extinction statistics. Other works respond to how animals are encountered through distortions of museum glass. Figures may be densely crowded, reflecting the overwhelm of mass loss, or rendered larger than life, confrontational and demanding attention.
My aim is to slow perception and draw the viewer into a quiet space where looking becomes an act of care. In a time when biodiversity loss is often reduced to data and headlines, I see painting as a space of resistance. Through sustained attention, I invite viewers to encounter absence, silence and the quiet agency that lingers in these preserved bodies, animals not only seen, but seen as looking back.
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