SOFT BOIL

A solo show by Nada Baraka

20 April - 13 May 2026

Gypsum is pleased to present Soft Boil, the third solo exhibition of new paintings and works on paper by Egyptian artist Nada Baraka.

The works emerge from an abandoned apartment in Garden City, once belonging to the artist’s late grandparents. Until the age of ten, Baraka gathered there every Friday, where family meals unfolded as ritual. Decades later, as the apartment faces imminent relinquishment under new rent laws, its untouched contents—furniture, handwritten letters, photographs, receipts, calendars—take on a different weight, shaped by uncertainty. For this body of work, the artist centers on the apartment’s kitchen and its objects—not as a fixed interior, but as a shifting environment suspended between presence and disappearance.

Baraka approaches painting as a process of searching rather than recording. Subjects materialise gradually, coaxed out through accumulated layers rather than declared from the outset. The images begin with the kitchen’s abandoned objects, but unfold alongside her memories of the space, skewed and distorted with time; ladders tilt into improbable positions, ceiling fans seem to recede into the architecture, tablecloths fall into uncertain depths. 

Muted palettes of greens, peaches, and beiges evoke the tiled interiors of the 1970s, while translucent washes settle over surfaces like residue or haze, partially obscuring access to space. Across the canvases, architectural structures are interrupted by drips, stains, and diluted marks—gestures that register both the material process of painting and the sensory life of the kitchen: water running, steam rising, scents diffusing into air.

The paintings extend beyond the canvas, emerging from sunken frames and resting on wooden shelves, as if they themselves were contents of the kitchen’s cabinets. Alongside them, a series of works on paper draw from traced found photographs in the artist’s family collection. Initially conceived to be installed within the kitchen’s structures, these works trace the afterlives of objects and their associated memories. A sound piece (produced and edited by Mohamed  El Maghraby), emanating from the gallery’s kitchen, further activates the space—composed of recordings such as the scrape of cutlery against plates and the steady drip of water.

Throughout the exhibition, Baraka holds the apartment in suspension — just before dispersal, before its contents are removed and redistributed. Memory and imagination settle into the work like residue, refusing full dissolution. What remains is quiet, sensory, insistent.

NADA BARAKA (b.1990) is an Egyptian artist living and working in Cairo. She holds an MA in Fine Art from Central Saint Martins, London, and a BA in Fine Art from the American University in Cairo. Her solo exhibitions include Gypsum (Cairo) and Mashrabia Gallery (Cairo). Selected group exhibitions include Helvetika1575 (Zug); Tabari Art Space (Dubai); Ebony Curated and Vela Projects (Cape Town); Gypsum (Cairo); What If The World Gallery (Cape Town); Apex Art (Cairo); Goethe-Institut (Cairo); Soma Art Gallery (Cairo); and Shanynay (Paris), amongst others. Baraka has participated in the Something Else Off Biennale at Darb 1718 (Cairo). She has received the ANNA Award from Latitudes Online and the International Open Call Exhibition grant from Apex Art. Her residencies include Townhouse Factory (Cairo) and an upcoming residency at Art Omi (New York). In 2023, she initiated the group project Valley of Walls, later realized as an Apex Art exhibition.