Naomi Pallagi (1993), lives and works in Berlin, Germany.

Naomi's practice is a restless search for freedom, channelled through raw, unpretentious energy and the slow accumulation of material. Working primarily in painting and, increasingly, in sculpture and three-dimensional objects, she moves between mediums with the same underlying impulse: to strip away the stiffness of convention and arrive at something that feels genuinely alive.

Her process is cyclical by nature. Layers are built up, obscured, and reborn until a work finds its own life. She thinks of her paintings as living organisms that must die and come alive again, repeatedly, before they are finished. Using a mix of water-based and oil-based mediums, she constructs slow, deliberate surfaces that culminate in an intentionally raw aesthetic. This 'ignorant' philosophy is a deliberate rejection of the clinical application of rules: a challenge to break them down, to unlearn the unconscious need to produce something beautiful and perfect, and to focus instead on the essence of a subject. The intuitive mark takes precedence over realistic detail, seeking a form of visual freedom that feels both lived-in and alive.

Her work evolves in cycles of obsession and release. Each series is driven by a particular fixation, whether a subject, an environment, or a sensation, returned to again and again until it yields something unexpected. In her current series, Somewhere with Palm Trees, that fixation turns on birds and the sensory memory of Mediterranean and tropical landscapes: not as an escape from the urban, but as a deep dive into a specific and recurring preoccupation. The work exists in dialogue between figurative subjects and the essence of memory, searching for the balance between the two.

Her recent expansion into sculpture and three-dimensional objects has grown from the same appetite for tactile, rule-breaking exploration. Working with accessible materials such as air-drying clay and wood, she is drawn to the different physical demands of three-dimensional making: the way the hands are engaged differently, the new constraints that arise and invite being broken. The conceptual world of her paintings and her objects remain one and the same; the medium changes, the preoccupation does not.