Nick Goss
In Nick Goss’ works on canvas and watercolors on paper, thin, delicate washes are punctuated by heavy brushstrokes depicting fantastical scenes of imaginary dystopia. Evoking a range of literary references from Huxley to McCarthy, with imagery culled from such diverse sources as the artist’s own photographs, comic-book material, and Social-Realist propaganda, they combine to create an exotic parallel universe.
Painted during a residency in Vienna, the works in “herz man sky,” his 2011 exhibition at Simon Preston Gallery in New York, interweave associations that gesture toward nostalgia and the melancholic. Subdued memories of defunct political histories, from colonialism, fascism to the American Frontier collide in what Bachelard describes in Poetics of Space as “theatres of the past.” A woman is carried regally in a Sedan chair, a desk fan appears gigantic, assuming the role of power station, an abandoned railway carriage is re-purposed as elaborate stage, each echoing a similar sense of magical realism. As Bachelard states, ‘Every corner in a house, every angle in a room, every inch of secluded space in which we like to hide, or withdraw into ourselves, is a symbol of solitude for the imagination.’
Goss has had solo exhibitions at Josh Lilley Gallery in London …
In Nick Goss’ works on canvas and watercolors on paper, thin, delicate washes are punctuated by heavy brushstrokes depicting fantastical scenes of imaginary dystopia. Evoking a range of literary references from Huxley to McCarthy, with imagery culled from such diverse sources as the artist’s own photographs, comic-book material, and Social-Realist propaganda, they combine to create an exotic parallel universe.
Painted during a residency in Vienna, the works in “herz man sky,” his 2011 exhibition at Simon Preston Gallery in New York, interweave associations that gesture toward nostalgia and the melancholic. Subdued memories of defunct political histories, from colonialism, fascism to the American Frontier collide in what Bachelard describes in Poetics of Space as “theatres of the past.” A woman is carried regally in a Sedan chair, a desk fan appears gigantic, assuming the role of power station, an abandoned railway carriage is re-purposed as elaborate stage, each echoing a similar sense of magical realism. As Bachelard states, ‘Every corner in a house, every angle in a room, every inch of secluded space in which we like to hide, or withdraw into ourselves, is a symbol of solitude for the imagination.’
Goss has had solo exhibitions at Josh Lilley Gallery in London and Simon Preston Gallery in New York. His work has also been shown at Summlung Lenikus in Vienna, Anna Kustera in New York, and the Saatchi Gallery in London.
Courtesy of Simon Preston Gallery
