Soup is delighted to participate in our second art fair, Artissima Turin 2025, with a solo presentation of new paintings by Nina Silverberg.

Nina Silverberg (b. 1994, Rome) is an Italian painter living and working in London. Her paintings are marked by their quiet energy, muted palette and often small scale. Characterised by both a solitary stillness and an implied intimacy, she examines ideas of isolation, sickness and the relationship between interior and exterior worlds. The artist’s subjects include timeless signifiers of human care and comfort, with sick beds serving as analogous self-portraits; silhouetted structures acting as architectural archetypes of the Mediterranean home; gloves personifying a fashion-forward approach to protection or precaution; and, most recently, books embodying an escape to that inviting inner realm. At once melancholic and reassuring, they suggest an inherent frailty and offer empowerment as coping mechanisms against our contemporary condition.

For Artissima, Silverberg builds on a body of work initiated at her solo exhibition The Library (Soup, 2024), turning to Argentine writer Jorge Luis Borges’ short story The Library of Babel (1941) for conceptual consideration. The essay, laced with Latin-American magical realism, imagines the universe as a library of near-infinite interconnected hexagonal galleries, each filled floor to ceiling with books. With no two books alike, Borges ponders the possibility and repercussions of the availability of all worldly knowledge. Recognising paintings’ significance as a historical medium, the story suits Silverberg’s natural inclination towards an obsessive, meditative repetition. Her practice a process of self-referential self-discovery, motifs from previous paintings and bodies of work begin to adorn the pages of her open books. As surrogates of the subconscious, these painted journals become containers for not only the artist’s current concentrations but also a contemplation of previous artistic intentions and future proposals.