Nelson Hernandez

Nelson Hernandez. Contemporary chilean painter.

Terraforming: Mapping Space Through Pigment, Nelson Hernandez

Terraforming: Mapping Space Through Pigment

Group exhibitionMuseum Street, London –

Terraforming: Mapping Space Through Pigment brings together five international artists reimagining London through colour, identity, and migration. Their works transform pigment into living geographies where memory and belonging converge.
Opening during Frieze Week at Museum Street, Bloomsbury.
Public view: 16–19
October Private View: 16 October, 7pm

Curated by Celeste Melgar

Terraforming gathers artists who explore how colour and material shape our understanding of place, identity and transformation. Through pigment, one of humanity’s oldest forms of communication, the exhibition reflects on how histories of movement, extraction, and exchange continue to mark the present.

Terraforming gathers artists who explore how colour and material shape our understanding of place, identity, and transformation. Through pigment, one of humanity’s oldest forms of communication, the exhibition reflects on how histories of movement, extraction, and exchange continue to mark the present. To terraform is to make new ground, to imagine a terrain where different ways of living and seeing can coexist. Here, pigment becomes an agent of renewal and possibility. It traces the layered connections between body and land, migration and belonging, memory and matter. Terraforming invites viewers to consider how colour carries not only beauty but history, how it moves across borders and surfaces, and how it can propose new ways of inhabiting the world.

Celeste Melgar

Gallery

Entrance area of Terraforming at Museum Street, 2025, with TERRA FORMING lettered on the wall. Large mixed-media work on unprimed canvas with coloured patches, visible stitching, and faint writing in the lower half. A small landscape painting hangs to the right.
Installation view of Terraforming at Museum Street, Bloomsbury, 2025. Gallery corridor with Victorian fireplace; a large luminous yellow-green painting visible in the back room. Right wall: Nelson Hernández's large figurative painting on dark ground. Multicolour abstract work on the left wall.
A visitor walks through Terraforming at Museum Street, Bloomsbury, 2025, with Nelson Hernández's The Slaying of the Hydra on the right and a large mixed-media work on the left wall.
Close view of the left wall at Terraforming, Museum Street, 2025, two small-format works by Nelson Hernández, and a Victorian fireplace. A large yellow-green painting is visible through the doorway to the inner room.
Night-time view from outside the gallery at Museum Street, Bloomsbury, 2025. TERRA FORMING text on the glass overlaps with reflections of the Victorian building opposite; artworks from the Terraforming exhibition are visible inside.
Daytime street view of the gallery at Museum Street, Bloomsbury, during Terraforming, 2025. TERRA FORMING title appears on the window alongside a QR code; the interior arrangement of exhibited works is visible through the glass.
Private view of Terraforming at Museum Street, Bloomsbury, October 2025. Visitors fill the main corridor of the gallery during the Frieze Week opening, with exhibited works visible throughout the space.

Exhibited works