Nadine van den Bosch in 1605 Magazine, no.2 Illusion (2025)
Nadine van den Bosch, director and co-founder of Young Collectors Circle—the leading platform for emerging art collectors—shares three art experiences that left a lasting impression on her. Explore the stories behind these personal favorites and what makes them so intriguing.
Over the years, I have followed the work of the talented Dutch-Hungarian photographer Satijn Panyigay (1988) with great interest. I was lucky enough to experience her work not only within the formal context of an exhibition but also in the intimate setting of her studio. These behind-the-scenes glimpses into the art world are very precious to me, offering a rare insight into the artist’s practice and revealing layers of the creative process that otherwise remain hidden.
When diving into Satijn Panyigay’s work, I was taken aback by the quiet yet profound sense of absence in her photographs. Her series Twilight Zone, that focusses on empty, deserted museum spaces, challenges us to see these familiar institutions as something otherworldly, almost uncanny. Looking at her work feels like stepping into an illusionary world where walls, corridors, and empty halls become the main characters. It’s as if Panyigay’s lens captures a reality just beyond our grasp—one that we might feel but can’t quite pinpoint.
Panyigay’s minimalist approach and subtle lighting play tricks on the mind. The absence of people within these museum spaces feels both calming and unsettling, urging us to question our relationship with these places. Her work challenges us to see museums not simply as containers for art but as structures with distinct identities, histories, and memories of their own. She subtly flips the roles: the museum is no longer just a backdrop or container; it becomes the subject itself, imbued with a presence that exists beyond its function. The haunting silence is not only about the lack of human presence but also about the weight of memory and time embedded within these seemingly empty walls. Through Panyigay’s lens, museums transform into living entities, their meaning shifting with our presence—or absence.
Her photographs draw you in, forcing a confrontation with emptiness that is at once intimate and remote. By stripping away the expected and leaving us with bare walls and soft shadows, Panyigay blurs the lines between reality and perception. In her spaces, we are reminded that what we see is often shaped as much by what is present as by what is conspicuously missing.
Frankfurter Rundschau
Review of the exhibition ‘Nightcall - The Frankfurt Edition’ at Galerie—Peter—Sillem by Anna Laura Müller, August 2024.
Frankfurt, quite quiet: Intruder into nighttime worlds
The artist Satijn Panyigay captures a feeling of silence in her photography series "Nightcall".
You almost wish it were a little darker when you look at Satijn Panyigay's photographs in the light-flooded rooms of the Peter Sillem Gallery. From outside, the sun and the sounds of passing traffic penetrate in, and yet the images that the young artist from Utrecht captured for her series "Nightcall" demand a kind of silence. The kind that only exists at night. When even in the offices in Frankfurt everyone has gone home. And the last person has turned off the light - or has forgotten it.
After Panyigay has focused on empty interiors in the past, such as empty museums and depots or still unoccupied rooms in newly built residential buildings, her attention is now turning to urban exterior facades. For this, the artist, born in 1988, has gone on nighttime trips in her hometown of Utrecht, but also in Frankfurt. She only used the light from street lamps and the moon for her analogue photographs. The images have something captivating about them, almost as if the silence and the gloom could swallow you up.
Some of the photographs show a schematically structured series of windows, some with only one brightly lit, surrounded by darkness. At first glance, everything seems like a stage set. Also because the scenes are completely devoid of people.
The buildings stand there deserted at night. There is still a light burning in some of the windows, but there is no sign of the people who filled the rooms and corridors behind them with life during the day. There is a melancholy in the images. A feeling of loneliness has settled over the otherwise hectic city at night.
And yet, on closer inspection, these nighttime scenes are not quite as sterile as the modern architecture and the darkness initially suggest. The rigid structure and perfection of the facade is broken here and there by cracks or stains of dirt that have formed and settled over time. Only those who get a little closer to the pictures discover these small signs of nature, which even the most urban environment cannot completely defend itself against.
The apparent calm in the pictures is not unbroken either. Although no people can be seen, they have left their mark. Perhaps someone has just walked through the glass staircase, from which the bright, artificially white light still shines out. Perhaps someone scurried around the next corner under the street lamp five minutes ago? Once you realize that the facades photographed are not backdrops, but only temporarily deserted buildings, you can certainly feel a sense of tension.
Because while Panyigay's pictures immerse city life in a gray detachment, you cannot help but ask yourself whether you, as the viewer, are actually penetrating a world that is not actually meant for you. It lies there so quietly and perhaps simply does not want to be disturbed. At least until the sun comes up again the next day.