"My work is about reclaiming what was taken from women — the knowledge of transformation and descent. In a society that turns a woman's natural passages into problems to be fixed, I paint what it actually feels and looks like to move through them."
Style & Technique
Noëmi Manser works primarily in oil on canvas, drawn to the medium for its capacity for depth, luminosity, and gradual transformation. Through glazing and repeated layering she builds complex surfaces where figures and environments emerge slowly over time. Light is not an effect in this work but a structuring element, one that gives each painting its spatial and emotional density.
The paintings are structured by the three stages of alchemical transformation: nigredo, albedo, rubedo. This is not symbolic reference but structural logic — the work enacts what it depicts. The nigredo is the darkness, dissolution, the death of what no longer holds. The albedo is what surfaces from that dark, slowly, the first light of what was hidden becoming visible. The rubedo is the return to the body, fully transformed. Not transcendence. Incarnation and embodiment.
The figures that move through these stages are consistently androgynous, not as a statement about gender, but as an image of wholeness. In alchemy the hermaphrodite represents the reconciliation of inner opposites, Sol and Luna held in one form. It is the image of a self that has been through the descent and come back with both halves intact.
Manser's visual language combines figurative elements with surrealist distortion, using symbolism and dream imagery to suggest states of transition and passage. Her practice begins with intuitive drawing, allowing images to surface without predetermined narrative. These drawings serve as raw material that is later translated through painting, where time, layering, and deliberate composition deepen and transform the initial image.
Rather than presenting fixed meanings, the work holds ambiguity as an active element. The paintings function as sites of containment, spaces where complexity, contradiction, and emotional intensity are given form without becoming illustrative or didactic. They ask for the kind of looking that takes time. They image what cannot be rushed.
CONNECTING BRAINS
Connecting Brains is a distinct body of work within Noëmi Manser's practice, centred on the repeated depiction of faces. Developed as a serial exploration, the project uses variation, repetition, and gesture to investigate presence, difference, and collective identity.
Working ambidextrously, Manser introduces shifts in pressure, rhythm, and symmetry, allowing each face to emerge with its own subtle character while remaining part of a larger visual system. The use of repetition emphasises both sameness and difference, creating a dynamic tension between individuality and collectivity.
While her broader studio practice is rooted in intuitive research and exploratory drawing, Connecting Brains functions as a focused, outward-facing series. Its clarity and consistency allow the work to operate across contexts, including public space, where the faces interact directly with architectural surfaces and viewers' daily movement.
This separation between private research and public series enables Manser to work intuitively while presenting a coherent and legible body of work that stands independently of its origins.