Artworks
Nick Goss
Tin Drum
12 October – 23 December 2012
Josh Lilley is delighted to announce the opening of Tin Drum, Nick Goss's second solo exhibition at the gallery.
To accompany the show, a 32-page full-colour catalogue has been published with a text by writer and curator Jasper Sharp. An edited version appears below:
Nick Goss paints places that he knows, that he has inhabited however briefly. His most recent body of work, brought together for the exhibition Tin Drum, depicts a series of largely interior spaces associated with his everyday activity the studio, a band rehearsal room, a museum or a library — where thoughts and ideas attempt to gain traction.
He is a deliberate painter. Working from drawings, photographs and rudimentary balsa wood and paper models, he employs an unspectacular vocabulary of forms to re-imagine a place, and his memory and experience of it. Tables, chairs, doors, pot plants, lamps and musical instruments emerge, sometimes only marginally, before receding again in time to reappear elsewhere. Figures appear beside them in several of the scenes, rehearsing or performing in a strange, carnival-like procession.
Looking at these new works, and at some of the earlier paintings that have preceded them, one senses an almost constant absence of resolution. They can at times feel wilfully incomplete. Some, such as Deluge or Timpani Hill seem to imply that they might once have contained a considerably greater level of visual information, which was subsequently removed, washed or scraped away. We perceive traces of removal and reduction, to accompany the recycling of objects.
In talking with the artist, it emerges that he has used a particular method to produce these works, applying paint to the canvas while it is wet. This obliges him to work more quickly, and counters his ability to subsequently erase any awkward or disturbing elements. They can be sunk, but never scuttled completely, left to sit somewhere beneath the surface.
Nick Goss (b. 1981 in Bristol, UK) lives and works in London. Goss completed his MFA at the Royal Academy Schools in 2009. Previous solo exhibitions include Herz Man Sky at Simon Preston Gallery, New York, 2011 and Veverka, Josh Lilley Gallery, London, 2010. Selected group exhibitions include Strata, Summlung Lenikus, Vienna, 2012, Never Ever Ever Land, Anna Kustera, New York, 2012, Gifted, Josh Lilley Gallery, London, 2011 and Newspeak: British Art Now, Saatchi Gallery, London, 2010.