NIGREDO - ALBEDO - RUBEDO

JO-HS is pleased to present Nigredo → Albedo → Rubedo, a group exhibition bringing together contemporary artists whose practices engage transformation as both material process and inner passage. Drawing from the ancient language of alchemy, the exhibition traces a journey through darkness, purification, and integration, mapping the evolution of matter alongside the awakening of consciousness.

Nigredo → Albedo → Rubedo refers to the threefold path of the alchemical Great Work. While historically associated with medieval attempts to transmute base metals into gold, alchemy is, at its core, a symbolic and spiritual system, one that understands transformation as inseparable from the inner life. These stages describe a process of dissolution, clarification, and unification, mirroring psychological states of confronting the shadow, attaining insight, and embodying wholeness.

The exhibition is structured as a sequential journey through these three phases. As visitors move through the space, the works shift in tone, materiality, and emotional register, guiding the viewer through a symbolic descent and re-emergence. The gallery itself becomes an alchemical vessel, a site where matter, perception, and meaning are continuously refined.

The alchemist is often imagined in pursuit of turning lead into gold,  yet the true gold lies in the transformation of the self, of spirit and perception. Alchemy, both a material and spiritual practice, is founded on the belief that all of nature is alive, interconnected, and transformable. Unlike modern science, which separates subject from object, alchemy perceives matter as infused with spirit. The alchemist’s laboratory was not only a site of chemical experimentation, but a theater of spiritual practice, a mirror of the soul. In this exhibition, artistic processes echo these traditions: working through fragmentation, purification, and synthesis to reveal what is hidden beneath the surface.

This exhibition bridges mysticism, materiality, and the pursuit of the divine through matter, ideas that continue to resonate through contemporary art. Artists today, like alchemists of old, seek the hidden correspondences between the visible and invisible, the earthly and the transcendent. Their work becomes a process of purification, revelation, and union, a mirror for the inner journey of transformation.


Alchemy, as both proto-science and poetic philosophy, teaches that transformation is dual: to change matter is to change consciousness. Through this process, the dense and chaotic are rendered luminous and whole. The alchemist seeks to unveil the hidden principles of nature — just as the artist seeks to reveal the hidden truths of perception. Transformation requires passage. It demands friction, attention, and loss. For the artist, the laboratory is both the world and the studio. To shape meaning today is to accept disorder, to remain with what is unresolved, and to refine it slowly. The noise must be filtered, the excess distilled, until something clearer can emerge.


The raw material of the present moment is our shared reality,  fractured, accelerated, and unstable. Alchemy today lies in the ability to work with this material, not to dominate it, but to recompose it into forms that allow connection. Through gesture, sound, surface, and presence, something fractured can be held together. At a moment when technical systems have reached a point of no return, art reintroduces imagination as a necessary force. It does not offer solutions, but it reopens perception. It transforms exhaustion into attention, collapse into possibility. This is the final transformation: not an escape from reality, but a reintegration of meaning, a return with something luminous.


DOWNLOAD PRESS RELEASE