Angela Maasalu - Des Bains

Angela Maasalu
Taking Courage

Des Bains
20 Great Portland Street
W1W 8QR London

There is a quiet yet persistent gravity in the paintings of Angela Maasalu. Her work operates like a visual palimpsest—what initially appears delicate and dreamlike slowly reveals itself to be layered with tension, dissonance, and emotional depth.

As she prepares to open Taking Courage at Galerie Des Bains, running from February 20 to March 20, one can anticipate yet another poignant exploration of the fragile balance between interior worlds and external realities.

Born in Estonia in 1990 and now based in London, Maasalu has honed a distinctive pictorial language, one that straddles the personal and the universal. Educated in painting and art history at Tartu University and Central Saint Martins, she constructs images that feel at once diaristic and deeply symbolic.

A house is never just a house in her work; it becomes an embodiment of belonging or estrangement. A mountain is not simply a landscape but a metaphor for longing, endurance, or an unattainable ideal.

These recurring motifs, softened by her signature palette of muted pastels, carry an emotional weight that slowly unfolds upon closer observation.

Yet Maasalu’s work is never didactic—it does not instruct, nor does it shock for the sake of provocation. Instead, it lingers. It asks the viewer to spend time, to unearth the psychological undercurrents beneath the surface.

Her recent exhibitions—whether in Shanghai, Viljandi, or Tartu—demonstrate a painter whose concerns are profoundly rooted in the human experience: anxiety, transition, memory, and the uncertain nature of safety.

Taking Courage is likely to continue this trajectory, probing what it means to stand one’s ground in a world that constantly shifts beneath our feet.

At a moment when contemporary art often veers between hyper-conceptualization and fleeting spectacle, Maasalu carves a different path. She slows things down.

Her paintings resist the instantaneity of digital culture, insisting instead on a longer engagement, a subtler dialogue. And that is precisely where her impact lies.

In a time of endless images, hers are the ones that stay with you, unfolding their quiet revelations long after you've left them behind. Taking Courage will, without a doubt, be another step in this quiet, profound resistance.