REVIEW I The MIGHT and MAGNITUDE of Nike Savvas

I visit Nike Savvas: Purple Haze at Orange Regional Gallery, New South Wales on a grey winter’s day. The subdued palette seems to prime the eye for the bejewelled scene ahead. Down the long corridor from reception, colourful shimmering atoms dance in the distance. The wondrous installation is Atomic: Purple Haze, 2026, by Nike Savvas. And in the space preceding, a swirling mass of colourful tape suspended from the ceiling appears to tickle the spheres. It is a glimpse of Rally, 2014, and a kaleidoscopic impression of the immersive exhibition that awaits.

Installation view (detail): Atomic: Purple Haze, 2026, polystyrene, nylon wire, acrylic paint, electric fans, air movement, 14 x 14 x 4.3 m. Nike Savvas: Purple Haze, 2026, Orange Regional Gallery, Orange. Photographed by Anna Kučera.

Nike Savvas: Purple Haze presents intimate screen prints and immersive large-scale installation and video work by Savvas from 2005–2026, each evocative of different places and landscapes. This ambitious exhibition was developed in partnership with the Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney, and supported by TLE Electricals. In a time of thinly spread federal and state government funding, this mix of public and private funding to present an exhibition of this scale and ambition at a regional gallery must be applauded.

Twenty-one years since Savvas began the Atomic series, Atomic: Purple Haze is the third installation. Australian-born with Greek-Cypriot heritage, Savvas is an artist whose work and identity are linked to different landscapes: Canberra, where she grew up; Cyprus, where her parents are from; London where she lived for over a decade and Sydney, where she lives and works. The two earlier iterations include Atomic: Full of Love, Full of Wonder 2005, recollecting the heat and colours of the Australian desert whilst Savvas was living in London, and Atomic: In Full Sunlight, 2008, evoking her ancestral connection to Cyprus through the gold Lapsana flower.

Installation view: Nike Savvas, Rally, 2014, plastic bunting, wire rigging, electric fans, dimensions variable. Nike Savvas: Purple Haze, 2026, Orange Regional Gallery, Orange. The artist dedicates this work to her sister Christina Savvas (1969–2013). Photographed by Anna Kučera.

Atomic: Purple Haze recalls the mass of Paterson’s Curse covering the landscape that Savvas would see whilst travelling on the Federal highway between her hometown, Canberra, and Sydney. The installation reduces the landscape down to atoms of colour, with thirty thousand coloured spheres suspended on fishing wire. It is a monumental kinetic installation of 14 x 14 x 4.3 metres. Within the endless white gallery walls there seems to be no end point. With a vast array of colours from fluorescent orange, pink, lime green, purple, blues and yellows as her palette, Savvas has positioned each of the spheres as if they are brushstrokes in a pointillist painting.

As your eyes adjust, drawing connections between the colours to make out the purple flower across the landscape, electric fans begin to blow. From a gentle hum, energy builds along the fishing line and crescendos as the spheres bounce with fierce intensity. It is entrancing in its optical majesty, thrumming with colour and energy. The shimmering colour creates a visceral feeling of the sublime, an awe-inspiring force of nature. Whilst there are many art references that can be drawn including pointillism, op art or even impressionism, here Savvas has adeptly manipulated scale, material and colour to echo the great expanse of the Australian landscape.

Installation view: Atomic: Purple Haze, 2026, polystyrene, nylon wire, acrylic paint, electric fans, air movement, 14 x 14 x 4.3 m. Nike Savvas: Purple Haze, 2026, Orange Regional Gallery, Orange. Photographed by Anna Kučera.

In presenting Purple Haze in Orange, in Central West NSW, the full force of Savvas’s masterful play with colour is intensely felt. Colour is keenly observed in the country. It registers the shift of time: changes in season, the time of day and the weather patterns in the landscape. Within the rolling hills and high altitude of Orange it saturates people, engrained in their memories and connection to place. Here the vibrant purples and lime greens are of Atomic: Purple Haze are more than familiar. As entrancing as it is, the purple of Paterson’s Curse is distinctly unnatural to the soft hues of the Australian environment. Highly, invasive pioneer species when the land is disturbed, Paterson’s Curse reduces pasture productivity, and in large quantities it is toxic to animals. The plant embodies a striking duality: beautiful to behold, yet overwhelming in its capacity to spread.

Entrancing in its layering and movement, Atomic: Purple Haze pulses with challenging dichotomies: the familiar and unfamiliar, the collective and the outsider, chaos and order. As we delight in the work, we are also aware of the discomfort of these tensions. This is the underlying thrill of Savvas’s work. She taps into the duality of things, sparking the intensity of when something, is two opposing things at once.

Installation view: Nike Savvas, Rally, 2014, plastic bunting, wire rigging, electric fans, dimensions variable. Nike Savvas: Purple Haze, 2026, Orange Regional Gallery, Orange. The artist dedicates this work to her sister Christina Savvas (1969–2013). Photographed by Anna Kučera.

From the distilled simplicity of her materials to the transformed final works, Savvas has a rich, material intelligence; she understands the many meanings an object can hold. Savvas uses unlikely materials including fish floats, electric fans, plastic tape or glitter and diamond dust. In the second exhibition space Rally, 2014, streams down from the towering ceiling. Thousands of coloured plastic tapes are suspended from above and directed by fans, creating a swirling, voluminous painting of colourful brushstrokes. Loaned from the Art Gallery of NSW, the work was first presented in the entrance hall referencing the act “to rally” and staked a claim for art in the central space of the gallery. Now presented for the first time in a new context, and a pastoral one at that, the swirling tape seems reminiscent of the movement of wind through grassy pastures.

Throughout the exhibition, we are treated to shifting experiences of landscape from the monumental to the intimate. There is a moment of quiet at the beginning of the exhibition with screenprints of the Cyprus Sea and the ocean. Diamond dust is scattered across Diamond Light, 2022, and Diamond Dusk, 2022, catching the light, twinkling and emulating the shift of light on the ocean. Savvas has captured the transient effect of light at dawn and dusk. It is fleeting and ephemeral, a moment in time suspended. The deep azure glitter in Black Ocean (ii), 2021, references the art of Kafemandia, in which coffee grounds leftover in a cup can tell the future. The absence of a clear horizon line in these large bodies of water leaves us swirling around in the endless water. Peering into the vast blue of the ocean time seems to be suspended between present and future. The glittering abstract surfaces of the screenprints are the first of many works in Purple Haze that play with our perspective and ask us to question our ways of seeing.

Installation view: Diamond Dusk, 2022, Diamond dust on Somerset paper, 83.5 x 133.5 cm, edition 1/5. Nike Savvas: Purple Haze, 2026, Orange Regional Gallery, Orange. Photographed by Anna Kučera.

The video work, A Million Suns, 2005–2026, created in collaboration with Stephen Little, immerses us in fluid abstract forms of everyday domestic and fine art products in water, creating fluid reactions. Presented in the Gallery theatre the large-scale video suspends us within nebulous scenes of swirling colour, shapes and bubbles as a children’s story is narrated . . . .“It’s not what you see it’s how you see calls Bartholomew as Little Bear rises in the hot air balloon and looks back down upon the landscape.” Reminiscent of a Carroll-esque trip down the rabbit hole, A Million Suns places us in a liminal state that floats between the known and unknown, the familiar and uncanny. As throughout the exhibition we are left to look for familiar markers of recognition or logic in the surreal places we find ourselves in.

Leaving the exhibition, I pass once again back through the glittering screenprints, as if a gateway to the shifting and shimmering world of Nike Savvas. Purple Haze is a rich exhibition that immerses us in the breadth and visceral intensity of the artist’s practice. In an increasingly polarised world, Savvas creates richly layered works that are filled with dualities. Shifting, turning and seemingly infinite, her works ask us to look, and look again, and be comfortable with the opposition and tensions that we encounter.

Installation view: Nike Savvas and Stephen Little, A Million Suns, 2005–2026, digital video projection, audio, 33:09 min, dimensions variable. Nike Savvas: Purple Haze, 2026, Orange Regional Gallery, Orange. Photographed by Anna Kučera.

Exhibitions
Nike Savvas: Purple Haze
27 June – 15 November 2026
Orange Regional Gallery, Orange, New South Wales

Walking Home: Road to Trachoni Kythreas
2 – 31 October 2026
MAIS WRIGHT, Sydney

Images courtesy of the artist; Orange Regional Gallery, Orange, New South Wales; Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney; Anna Kučera; ARC ONE Gallery, Melbourne; MAIS WRIGHT, Sydney.

Lucy Stranger is an arts writer and curator based in the Central West region of New South Wales.

The article was first published in Artist Profile Issue 76, 2026.