Collection: Where the City Whispers

Where the City Whispers brings together three distinct yet resonant artistic voices — Marianne Pon-Layus, Iryna Merkulova, and Mathilde Bois — each exploring how we perceive, inhabit, and imagine the urban world. Through figure, gesture, object, and narrative, the exhibition listens for the city’s subtler myths: the folklore embedded in its streets, the unseen rhythms of lived space, and the quiet momentum of personal and collective imagination.

Marianne Pon-Layus charts a visual terrain where folk tales, fairy-tale imagery, and surreal presence collide. Her figures — at once powerful and ambivalent — are drawn from a rich repertoire that includes echoes of pagan deities, hybrids, and mythic archetypes, creating an unsettling dialogue between the everyday and the uncanny. These works rethink representation, identity, and power, underlining how narrative and stereotype shape our understanding of self and community. Amid seemingly familiar urban scenes, her compositions transform into fables of memory and metamorphosis — a city that feels lived, dreamt, and whispered.

In contrast, Iryna Merkulova works within a realist idiom anchored in observation and perception, yet opens up that realism to spaces of reflection and ambiguity. Her paintings often frame architectural elements — windows, thresholds, interior vignettes — not simply as static surfaces but as portals between what is seen and what remains just beyond view. By attending to reflections, thresholds, and the interplay of inside-outside, Merkulova positions urban space as a lived psychological field. Through carefully observed compositions, she encourages viewers to consider how memory, belonging, and the built environment shape our visual and emotional experience.

Mathilde Bois expands the exhibition’s perceptual field into sculpture and symbolic form, where birds and crafted objects become quiet emissaries of attention and meaning. Her three-dimensional works  whether perched, in flight, or grounded — evoke stories of movement, connection, and shelter. These sculptural elements complement the show’s painterly dialogues, offering tactile counterpoints that anchor the intangible whispers of the city in material presence.

Together, these artists invite viewers to slow down, to inhabit thresholds — between the real and the surreal, the visible and the hidden — and to hear the city’s murmurs not as background noise, but as poetic echoes of lived experience, mythic memory, and perceptual wonder.