In 2021, Zellen began a series of intimate square gouache paintings that translate concerns present throughout her broader practice into a distinctly painterly language. Working with a palette inspired by mid-century color design, she explores relationships between shapes, colors, scale, and spatial tension. Painted silhouettes or small drawn figures populate these compositions. They are surrounded by abstract forms evoking buildings, streets, and architectural fragments. The paintings feel less like pictures of places and more like diagrams of lived experience. Neither purely abstract nor representational, the paintings occupy a space between map, stage set, and memory, inviting viewers to imagine stories unfolding within these carefully structured environments.

Zellen's gouache paintings extend themes that have animated her digital practice for years: movement through space, the experience of the city, and the interplay between individual and collective narratives. They are simultaneously playful, contemplative, and cinematic. As an installation, they unfold as an open-ended visual dialogue in which anonymous figures move through imagined environments that are at once architectural, psychological, and deeply human.

Click here to see the individual paintings