Nike Savvas | ’17 Seconds’
Presenting her first solo show at Dominik Mersch this October, Nike Savvas continues to push her work in new directions as she explores the process behind remembering in her latest geometric works.
Inspiration for the work came from Savvas reading The Glass Bead Game by Hermann Hesse. A response to oppressive times, and about the longing for a new order amongst the chaos, the book explores the interconnectivity of everything in life. As well as an individual’s search for authenticity.
Exploring the interconnectivity of memory and how it is collated, 17 Seconds draws from an experience by Savvas, who had a thought for 17 seconds, which she then remembered and recorded the thought.
Examining the networks of thought and association in this process, Savvas explains, “The process of remembering leads to a scenario of association perhaps best described as a perceptual collaging of fragments from memory. In this, not all information is recalled and often some parts remain omitted. This is drawn from a notion of chance – where a work results from the conflation of ones imagination, chance thoughts and memory. The process is left open, is often automatic and pre-empts the creation of new work and new meanings. The work in this show continues my interest in mental imaging, perceptual phenomena and the creative process”.
An exhibition that developed since her residency in Paris earlier this year, it showcases new works using different colour palettes, media and formats. The centrepiece is a freestanding geometric large-scale installation. As intriguing as it’s patterns are entrancing, ’17 Seconds’ promises to be both visually arresting and mentally engaging – and longer than 17 seconds we hope.
EXHIBITION
Nike Savvas | ’17 Seconds’
6 October – 29 October
Dominik Mersch Gallery
Courtesy the artist and Dominik Mersch Gallery, Sydney.


Recognition of the importance of early bark paintings and their link to the world’s oldest continuing culture, is what makes them both highly sought and...
I had come to see my daughter sing in Deborah Kelly’s Creation Choir and was fortunate enough to make it inside the gallery for the...
Cuban-born, Brisbane-based artist Jorge Mariño Brito’s practice unfolds across two material registers that are best understood not as parallel tracks but as entwined explorations. Both...
The first work you encounter in Edge City is a gate, Settlement #8, 2025. Not one to pass through (not anymore), but a threshold nonetheless....
Designed to impress, the number and size of paintings—twenty-nine at nine square metres each and one even bigger—are a spectacle, lifting the exhibition from an...
Skilfully assimilating secondary sources throughout Paris in Ruins, Smee at the conclusion of Part One, “Salon of 1869,” writes that Auguste Renoir’s and Claude Monet’s...
Multidisciplinary artist Shireen Taweel looks skyward, into the night and beyond, with her exhibition the trig point. Drawing on fieldwork in 2025 at the Siding...
It was back in 2011 that Pip Wallis, senior curator at the Monash University Museum of Art (MUMA), remembers first seeing the work of Balinese...
Senior Pitjantjatjara artist, Tuppy Ngintja Goodwin, was born in 1952 near Bumbali Creek in the Northern Territory, close to the border with South Australia; daughter...