The Zurich-based artist reinterprets the fear of emptiness from a feminist, psychological and socio-political perspective, through a pictorial reappropriation of the aesthetics of bureaucratic documents.
Wanda Nay explores the intricate tension between personal expression and institutional control through her distinctive drawing practice. For this series Nay primarily works with colored pencils on official documents, she reclaims the aesthetic space of bureaucratic systems—forms, certificates, applications—by transforming them into vibrant, flowing compositions. At the heart of her work lies the classical concept of "horror vacui", Latin for "fear of empty space," which she reinterprets through a feminist, psychological, and socio-political lens. This aesthetic is not incidental; it reflects a reaction to the silent violence of administrative systems—spaces where identities are reduced to checkboxes and lives compressed into lines of text. In overwriting these documents, she doesn't erase them, but rather drowns them in visual complexity, creating a kind of protest through excess.
Her use of colored pencils—often seen as a medium of childhood or innocence—adds a subtle layer of irony and contradiction. The softness of the tool stands in stark contrast to the rigidity of the forms beneath, creating a tension that is as conceptual as it is visual. The playful hues and rhythmic marks don't lighten the work; they deepen its discomfort, turning each drawing into a negotiation between containment and eruption.
In Nay's version of horror vacui, the fear of emptiness is not just aesthetic—it's existential. Her drawings ask: What happens when the individual pushes back against systems designed to flatten them? By overwhelming the frameworks meant to confine her, Wanda Nay doesn't just fill the void—she reclaims it.
Wanda Nay (born 1980) is a Swiss artist based in Zurich.
