L A R A N I C K E L
LARA NICKEL AT
THE MALTA BIENNALE 2026
Announcing the presentation of Lara Nickel's painting-installation 12 Horses — Homage to Jannis Kounellis at the Malta Biennale 2026. 12 Horses is shown at The Stables of the Grand Master’s Palace in Valletta, one of the largest of all the Biennale’s exhibition sites.
The Malta Biennale 2026, held under the theme CLEAN CLEAR CUT, is organized by Heritage Malta and takes place from March 11 to May 29 with acclaimed international curator Rosa Martínez as Artistic Director. I am honored by Ms. Martínez for personally selecting my work for this important exhibition. CLEAN CLEAR CUT is hosted across 11 cultural and historical sites — many of which are designated as UNESCO World Heritage Sites.
Lara Nickel’s 12 Horses – Homage to Jannis Kounellis is a tribute to Kounellis’ 1969 piece in which twelve living horses were brought inside a gallery in Rome. Nickel’s installation is composed of twelve life-size, realistic paintings of horses, positioned on the ground and displayed perpendicularly to the wall, making the images of horses appear to be standing in the room. This invites viewers to physically engage with the paintings in a sculptural way by walking in between and around them where they can see all sides.
The paintings are fixed illusionistic representations as well as images which shift and distort because of their display. Because the canvases designate and define the space, the entire physical expanse of the gallery belongs awkwardly to the paintings and not to the viewer. The empty space between the paintings is highlighted; the void, or the non-painting, becomes an integral part of the picture plane. Like Kounellis’ piece, Nickel’s installation comments on how painting is a fundamental concept – a painting carries an image but is not limited to the image. These paintings are not only portraits of horses but painting-as-illusion, painting-as-object, and painting-as-situation.
REVIEWS
RFA PROJECTS:
"Hommage as a return—at Malta Biennale, the gesture turns toward Jannis Kounellis—not to recall, but to reactivate. @lara.nickel moves within this lineage, where matter carries memory and form resists closure. 12 Horses becomes a quiet echo—an image suspended between presence, weight and myth.
In 1969, Jannis Kounellis presented Twelve Horses at Galleria L’Attico in Rome—a gesture that remains inscribed in the living archive of Arte Povera.
Emerging as the Italian articulation of Post-Minimalism, Arte Povera embraced the elementary, the raw, the unadorned—materials drawn from the world without hierarchy, without illusion. In this field of reduction, intensity became the measure. As noted by The New York Times, art revealed itself as a condition rather than an object: that anything may become art, provided it carries a force that separates it from the ordinary flow of life.
An hommage as a condition, where history breathes through material, and the invisible is held, for a moment, in place."
UMBIGO MAGAZINE:
"...the biggest surprise at the Grand Master’s Palace was Lara Nickel’s installation 12 Horses – Homage to Jannis Kounellis (2018), housed in the former stables. Drawing inspiration from Jannis Kounellis’s work Untitled (12 horses)—in which, in 1969, he placed twelve live horses inside a gallery in Rome—Nickel revisits this gesture by replacing the animals with twelve life-size paintings, arranged on the floor perpendicular to the stable walls, as if they were physically occupying the space. This configuration compels us to move among canvases, revealing both the images and the backs of the paintings, thereby activating their three-dimensionality. The installation is further enhanced by being exhibited in the palace’s former stables, which function as a conceptual extension of the work, reinforcing the tension between past and present, real animal and image, presence and representation. Nickel turns the painting into a body that occupies the space, breaking down the usual distance between image and viewer, forcing us to physically traverse and pass through it."
Clean, Clear, Cut: The 2026 Malta Biennial by Laurinda Branquinho