When I chose Water as the theme for this exhibition, I expected to see many works about seas, rivers, rain and reflections. And of course, they are here. But while reviewing the submissions, I realised how differently artists understand something that is so familiar to all of us. Water appears in these works as a place, a memory, a surface, a force, and sometimes simply as a feeling.

For some artists, it is connected to a specific landscape: the sea they live beside, a river they remember, a lake, a coastline, or a moment of light moving across the surface. In other works, water becomes much more personal. It speaks about transformation, isolation, resilience, spirituality, migration, environmental loss, or the uncertainty of what exists beneath what we can see.

What interested me most while curating the exhibition was this contrast. Water can be completely peaceful and, at the same time, incredibly powerful. It can reflect an image clearly and then, with one small movement, distort it entirely. It can connect places and people, but it can also create distance. Some artists approached this through direct observation of the natural world, while others used abstraction, photography, installation, mixed media and the human figure to explore these ideas. In several works, water is not even physically present; its absence, memory or behaviour becomes the subject instead.

Because of the number and range of works selected, we decided to present Water in two volumes. I don't see these as two separate exhibitions, but as two parts of the same conversation. Together, they show how one element can travel across countries, cultures, materials and individual experiences and still remain immediately recognisable to all of us.