horror vacui

Zürich-based artist Wanda Nay explores the intricate tension between personal expression and institutional control through her distinctive drawing practice. For this series Nay primarily works with colored pencils on official documents, she reclaims the aesthetic space of bureaucratic systems – forms, certificates, applications – by transforming them into vibrant, flowing compositions. At the heart of her work lies the classical concept of "horror vacui", Latin for "fear of empty space," which she reinterprets through a feminist, psychological, and socio-political lens. This aesthetic is not incidental; it reflects a reaction to the silent violence of administrative systems – spaces where identities are reduced to checkboxes and lives compressed into lines of text.