The exhibition ORIGIN OF ASYMMETRY brings together works from various new series by Dutch-Hungarian photographer Satijn Panyigay that refer to her recurring search for balance within architectural environments, and her fascination with the imperfect.

Satijn Panyigay has built a consistent oeuvre centered around uninhabited spaces: museums between exhibitions, storage depots, houses under construction, vacant offices. These environments, empty at the moment of her visits, allow the artist to immerse herself in the emptiness. Panyigay always chooses spaces in transition and, regardless of the setting or scale, her work consistently returns to the same question: what remains when people leave?

Panyigay's work is inspired by large existential questions that remain unanswered. The artist takes this contradiction as her starting point: the way humans simultaneously seek and disrupt natural harmony, from which they tend to forget they are part of. It is this disbalance where her fascination lies. As a photographer, Panyigay looks for silence and stillness in architectural spaces, but it is precisely the functional aspects of those spaces, the traces of how they are used, that make them appealing to her.

The images we present in ORIGIN OF ASYMMETRY are created in analogue color and are quiet and unhurried. Walls, electric outlets, stains, holes, shadows, and gradients of light. In Panyigay's photos, everyday details take on a special atmosphere.

The photographs of Twilight Zone (Kunstmuseum Den Haag) play with architectural rhythm and muted institutional lighting. In Realm I and Sudden Epiphany I, she ventures into domestic interiors: empty rooms with ornate cornices, bare walls. Equilibrium I goes a step closer and zooms into surfaces, textures, colour, and light until the composition dissolves toward abstraction. The atmosphere in all four series is both intimate and anonymous, personal in nature yet open enough for everyone to recognize.

In this exhibition, Panyigay alternates monumental formats with small, intimate works, indirectly referencing the vast and unknowable versus the small and overlooked, where so much beauty and value can be found.

Text by Galerie Caroline O’Breen for the upcoming show ORIGIN OF ASYMMETRY