Gaby Nighan

Courtesy of the artist and ARC.

MEAM Exhibition Award and Dual Category Award in the 18th International ARC Salon® online exhibition;

17th & 18th International ARC Salon® Exhibition at Sotheby's New York, July 17-27, 2026.

Art Renewal Center, International Realism: 17th & 18th International ARC Salons (Woodbridge, UK: ACC Art Books Ltd, 2026), pp. 18, 45, illustrated.

“This painting is a rite of passage of exiting my twenties. When I made this painting, the subject, my colleague and talented artist Victor Pierrey, was finishing his studies and preparing to return to Europe. We spoke of the uncertainty that accompanies ending one chapter and beginning a new one. Victor stands in a vast desert at midnight, a brief moment in the day that can be seen as an end, or a beginning. Midnight is dark, silent, a container for transformation. He looks back on the path he is leaving, and gazes ahead at the new path he is to embark upon. The painting symbolizes my own “midnight” as I close my twenties, a turbulent period I look back on with gratitude, understanding the path forward cannot exist without the path behind. This painting is a reaffirmation that the journey itself is the meaning, and that darkness contains beginnings.” – Gaby Nighan