The Garden Within cultivates peace and care via material forms at Mia Karlova Galerie

In the heart of Amsterdam, Mia Karlova Galerie's latest exhibition, The Garden Within, presents a selection of works rooted in tactile materials and intimate gestures. The show leans into slowness and emotional presence, suggesting that solitude, approached deliberately, can act as a subtle form of resistance to the pace and pressures of contemporary life. Running from May 28 – July 31, 2025, the art and design exhibition gathers the work of seven visual artists and contemporary designers—Femke van Gemert, Anastasia Pribelskaya, Jesse Visser, Anna Kunst, Valeriya Isyak, Vadim Kibardin and Valery Pchelin—offering a portal to an 'inner garden' where repair, reflection and renewal take root.

Curated by gallerist Mia Karlova alongside art historian Marina Shirskaya, The Garden Within foregrounds sensory experience through material richness and engages with texture, form and atmosphere as pathways to reflection. Paper, porcelain, crystal, fabric, textile and reclaimed cardboard are not used simply for their aesthetic qualities; they become languages and carry meaning. Each chosen for its texture, fragility or history, the materials contribute to the work's emotional and conceptual weight.

This emphasis on materiality is especially potent in the tapestries of Dutch artist Femke van Gemert. Her textile installation, Me Clair Obscure, is at once beautiful and bruised and delves into the evolving selfhood of women navigating midlife. Made from layered, discarded textiles, its earthy tones and worn neutrals give the textile design a sense of weathered depth. The overall form undulates gently, suggesting movement and a soft unravelling. Van Gemert's interest in waste is not merely a gimmick or ecological posture, but an existential metaphor: What do we discard within ourselves, and what beauty might emerge from it?

Here, The Garden Within begins to reveal its underlying intention; not just to soothe, but to challenge the visitor to face parts of themselves often left unexamined. It is crucial to acknowledge how these layered compositions explore, in a non-exhaustive manner, themes as quotidian as care and inner balance, which, the show evinces, is not instant but cultivated. As the exhibition's curators put it, "This process becomes a mirror for the viewer: a slow, manual, almost ritual act of assembling that reflects the path toward one's own inner garden."

This duality of solace and confrontation runs throughout the show at the art gallery. The luminous, fragile glass florals by Russian artist Anastasia Pribelskaya, rendered with near-scientific precision, reject their role as mere decoration. She employs lampworking technique to shape heated glass rods into tightly furled buds and withering flowers. These flowers take centre stage and demand to be seen as autonomous beings. Departing from an anthropocentric consideration, her glass compositions hint at the systemic invisibility of non-human lives. Such shifts toward post-human aesthetics are not just academic; they provoke deep questions about presence and value. What role do we play in the ecosystem when nature no longer exists for our benefit alone?

Furthermore, the political dimension of this quietude is subtle but ever-present. Prioritising zero-waste designs, Anna Kunst's Primal Awe bench—raw, sculptural and reverent—is less an object and more an offering, inspired by themes of loss, pain and healing. Made of calcite crystals and dead stock linen, the sculptural installation speaks of her deep resonance with nature and its elusive energy. "Kunst translates her connection to nature and life outside urban infrastructure into objects that invite touch, stillness and presence. These are not merely functional art items, but expressions of care for the body and space," the curators tell STIR. The furniture design creations challenge us to critically reassess our often overlooked relationship with the earth, its animistic forces and our sense of self.

However, for all its introspective depth, The Garden Within is not a solemn show. Acclaimed lighting designer Jesse Visser's light sculptures introduce a philosophy of movement. Kinetic and contemplative, his lighting design series, Pulse Light, suggests that even the subtlest gesture can trigger waves of transformation. These objects do not simply occupy space; they animate it.

Conversely, Prague-based artist and industrial designer Vadim Kibardin champions sustainable principles through his circular designs and channels organic forms and growth patterns observed in nature into mind-bending sculptural interior designs. His surreal chair design, Off-White chair, and floor lamp Black Nostalgia mediate between symbolic resonance and material reality, acting as a tangible site for renewal and restoration.

Additionally, the curators resist framing the exhibition as a retreat into passivity. Instead, it proposes inwardness as an active, even radical, mode of engagement. A similar sentiment runs through Valeriya Isyak's porcelain petals, arranged into wall-mounted mosaics that evoke fragmentation and healing. As a Ukrainian-born ceramic artist living in a bustling urban environment, Isyak's work speaks to the costs of living in a hyperproductive world. Her work, Affinity, responds to this mechanical, reductive state as an act of emotional mending.

The Garden Within also contributes to the ongoing conversation around visibility for feminised forms of artistic labour, particularly in the context of craft, care and domestic materiality. "[It] reclaims craft as a vital mode of artistic voice and positions care, as an act requiring strength and attention, at the centre of cultural dialogue." Therefore, by foregrounding sentiments of empathy and care through emphasis on tactile materials and craftsmanship, the exhibition challenges conventional hierarchies in art which have existed for much of human history and invites a deeper recognition of the value embedded in feminised artistic practices and domestic labour.

The exhibition closes on a quietly powerful note with Valery Pchelin's dynamic sculpture art, Drifters; wooden creatures caught mid-motion. They become poetic archetypes of the human condition: ever in motion, ever searching. They do not escape, instead, they endure. And in doing so, the sculptures remind us that peace is not a destination, but a practice. The exhibition text aptly embodies this sentiment: "They are driven by a longing for peace; not one found externally, but one that emerges from within."

'The Garden Within' is on view from May 28 – July 31, 2025, at the Mia Karlova Galerie in Amsterdam, the Netherlands.