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
"...the biggest surprise at the Grand Master’s Palace was Lara Nickel’s installation 12 Horses – Homage to Jannis Kounellis…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."
– UMBIGO MAGAZINE, Clean, Clear, Cut: The 2026 Malta Biennial, by Laurinda Branquinho
“This confusion between image and object brings us back to Nickel’s primary concerns — that the painting should simultaneously operate as a physical presence and a representational gateway for the imagination. This is reflected in her interests in classical art history, postwar art, reductive, abstract painting of the 1960s, and Arte Povera’s engagement with what happens when painting’s traditional subjects are transposed into real space. These concerns are what lead Nickel to work on installations comprised of spatial arrangements of canvases, rather than individual paintings. In this way her work provokes its viewers to reexamine reality and representation.”
– Alex Bacon, Between Image and Object
“At the Grand Master’s Palace, American-French artist Lara Nickel‘s 12 Horses—Homage to Jannis Kounellis interrogates the conceptual boundaries of painting and its interaction with space and time.…inverting conventional hierarchies of spectatorship.”
– ART SPIEL, How Malta Biennale 2026 Reimagines Site-Specificity, by Eva Zanardi
“When visitors enter the stables of the Grand Master’s Palace in Valletta, one of the largest exhibition sites for the Malta Biennale 2026, they’ll discover a dozen life-size horse paintings by Santa Fe–based artist Lara Nickel standing on the ground within the space rather than hanging on the walls.”
– SOUTHWEST CONTEMPORARY, What it takes for artists to show at International Biennials, by Lynn Trimble
“Bringing together artists of different generations and reputations whose main common ground lies in shifting scales of perception through a critical relationship to history and materials…Lara Nickel metaphorically restores the stables’ function by installing twelve life-size paintings of horses paying tribute to Jannis Kounellis…”
– ARTPRESS, Malta Biennale ’26, by Marie de Brugerolle
"Homage 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. An homage as a condition, where history breathes through material, and the invisible is held, for a moment, in place."
– RFA PROJECTS
“Unlike the static quality that is sometimes attributed to painting (even though it is in no way one of its fundamental elements), Nickel’s horses are traces of what we are able to see through the movement of our gaze, a possible beyond in which human beings, nature, and life are one…for Duchamp, the transition from the idea to the actual work took place in the thinness and lightness that could be perceived or otherwise by the external gaze. He described this dimension as “infrathin,”…Lara Nickel’s pictorial images exist in an ethereal, impalpable, infrathin dimension, and therefore one charged with artistic intensity.”
– José Jiménez, Transversal Gazes
“Lara Nickel has recently garnered attention for her significant installation, 12 Horses – Homage to Jannis Kounellis (2018), at the 2026 Malta Biennial…Nickel's work revisits Kounellis’s iconic 1969 piece by replacing live animals with twelve life-size paintings. This setup compels viewers to navigate among the canvases, revealing both the images and their backs, thus activating their three-dimensionality and breaking down the traditional distance between art and viewer... and engage with themes of past and present, presence and representation.”
– HENI NEWS