The Body in the Room: London

25 April - 12 May 2026
  • JD Malat Gallery is pleased to present The Body in the Room, a group exhibition bringing together paintings by Nanci Byrne, Katarina Časerman, Emma Cousin, and Ngai Ning Yu, examining the body as a site of negotiation between presence and withdrawal, legibility and concealment. Byrne and Časerman present the body with mythic force, while Cousin’s figures occupy a stranger middle ground, physical yet estranged from themselves. In contrast, Yu’s interiors suggest withdrawal, where only traces of habitation remain, a shadow or silhouette, questioning what remains when the body is absent.
  • Ngai Ning Yu, Arrival 02, 2026 (Larger version of this image opens in a popup).
    Ngai Ning Yu, The flowers, 2026 (Larger version of this image opens in a popup).
    Katarina Časerman, Spavanqa, 2021 (Larger version of this image opens in a popup).
    Nanci Byrne, I will be with you when you loose your breath, 2025 (Larger version of this image opens in a popup).
    Ngai Ning Yu, Arrival 02, 2026
  • Ngai Ning Yu (b. 2003, Hong Kong)
    Ngai Ning Yu, I can’t remember how it was, 2026, Oil on cradled wood panel, 12 x 12 x 1 5/8 in, 30.5 x 30.5 x 4.1 cm

    Ngai Ning Yu (b. 2003, Hong Kong)

    A London-based contemporary oil painter. Her work explores ‘home’ as an emotional space shaped by memory, light, and domestic interiors. Working between memory and invention, she creates quiet, atmospheric compositions that reflect the tension between inner experience and external reality. She graduated from the University of the Arts London in 2025 with First Class Honours in Fine Art: Painting.
  • Katarina Časerman (b. 1990s, Slovenia)
    Katarina Časerman, Spavanqa, 2021, Signed and dated on the reverse, Oil on canvas, 90.5 x 110 cm

    Katarina Časerman (b. 1990s, Slovenia)

    A multidisciplinary artist working across painting and drawing, developing a practice that combines gestural abstraction with subtle figuration through layered, material-led processes. Her work is shaped by repetition and intuitive mark-making, balancing control and release while leaving traces of earlier gestures visible to create evolving compositions centred on texture, surface, and colour.
  • Nanci Byrne (b. 1988, London, UK)
    Nanci Byrne, I will be with you when you loose your breath, 2025, Oil on Linen, 29 1/2 x 37 3/8 in, 75 x 95 cm
     

    Nanci Byrne (b. 1988, London, UK)

    London-based painter whose work draws on her background in textile design and references sources ranging from 17th-century tapestries and the Arts and Crafts movement to video games and literary texts. Her ornate compositions challenge ideas of the decorative, combining soft, patterned surfaces with unsettling, dreamlike imagery. Exploring themes of motherhood and womanhood, her paintings often use dark humour, animal motifs, and tensions between repetition, pattern, and disruption.