Silence is the Door
The Small Gallery, Grampian Hospitals Art Trust, Aberdeen
10 February – 30 April 2024
Silence is the Door, presented at The Small Gallery within Grampian Hospitals Art Trust, reconsiders contemporary abstraction through the lived reality of a hospital environment. Rather than positioning abstraction as a retreat into metaphysical distance, Zibeyda Seyidova’s paintings operate as subtle interventions within spaces shaped by waiting, vulnerability, and care. Here, painting becomes an art of thresholds—quietly inhabiting the intersection of architecture, attention, and human presence.
Installed throughout hospital corridors and shared spaces, the works merge gently with their surroundings. Seyidova’s restrained palette of off-whites, muted greys, and soft ochres nearly dissolves into the walls, refusing spectacle or visual assertion. This near-invisibility is intentional: the paintings do not demand attention but accompany it, unfolding slowly within the rhythms of daily hospital life.
Working in oil with a reduced, deliberate touch, Seyidova layers paint until subtle cracks, diagonals, and tonal shifts emerge. These elements echo the structural geometries of the hospital itself—ceilings, partitions, passageways—while resisting full alignment with them. The canvases hover between presence and disappearance, proposing a form of abstraction that neither represents nor escapes, but remains suspended in a state of quiet attentiveness.
Within the context of contemporary British abstraction, Seyidova’s approach stands apart for its radical restraint. Where much contemporary painting asserts itself through colour, texture, or visual disruption, her work embraces reduction and silence as active materials. The result is an art that risks vanishing, yet gains strength through its refusal to overwhelm. In the hospital setting, these paintings function less as objects of contemplation and more as acts of accompaniment—present without insistence, attuned to fragile economies of focus and care.
This exhibition extends concerns present in Seyidova’s earlier project Light Embraces Shadow at Galerie Cinéma in Lyon (2022), where she explored the interplay of light and darkness through more pronounced contrasts. That exhibition was awarded the Jeune Vague Award (2D Category) in France in 2023. In Aberdeen, however, the work becomes quieter and more distilled, allowing silence itself to take on a central role.
Based between the UK, Turkey, and Azerbaijan, Seyidova brings a transnational perspective to her practice. Her disciplined reduction resonates with Islamic aniconic traditions while remaining deeply engaged with European abstraction. This cultural mobility allows her work to operate across contexts while remaining grounded in the intimacy of direct encounter.
In Silence is the Door, transcendence is not imagined as escape but as presence. The exhibition proposes painting as a form of care—an expanded attentiveness embedded within institutional space. Through restraint, stillness, and subtlety, Seyidova demonstrates how abstraction can continue to resonate beyond the gallery, opening not onto the beyond, but onto a deeper experience of the present.
Venue:
The Small Gallery
Grampian Hospitals Art Trust
Foresterhill, Aberdeen AB25 2ZN
United Kingdom
Exhibition dates:
10 February – 30 April 2024