Nick Goss (b. Bristol, 1981) is an Anglo Dutch painter whose (essentially figurative) paintings suggest apparently contradictory readings. On one hand there is the recognisable specificity of objects and environments rooted in factual, documentary reality: a photographic starting point perhaps, or an archival image offering an intensely palpable sense of place or experience. On the other there is always something more liminal at play - an uncertainty and otherness that never quite explains itself.
It is in this ambiguity and sometimes dreamlike strangeness that these images reveal their power and presence. They have an unreliable relationship to time, being connected to memory and a kind of nostalgia, and yet existing precisely in their own moment. They are built slowly in thin layers of often muted pigment over screen-printed images, with small shifts of focus that simultaneously coalesce and fragment. At times they slide towards abstraction in form, but never in mood, which almost always remains resolutely tangible.
Nick Goss has exhibited widely in Europe and America and has work in many distinguished collections including the Metropolitan Museum of Art; Dallas Museum of Art; Cleveland Museum of Art and the Zabludowicz Collection, London. Recent exhibitions include: The Undercurrents at Mathew Brown, Los Angeles; Margaritas at the Mall, Contemporary Fine Arts, Berlin; Nine Mile Burn at Josh Lilley, London and Morley’s Mirror at Pallant House Art Gallery.
Smickel Inn, Balcony of Europe, Ingleby's first solo exhibition with Goss, which included a number of new paintings and watercolours, was on view at Ingleby from September - December, 2023. To celebrate the show, a new 116pp publication, Smickel Inn, has been published by Ingleby, Matthew Brown and Anomie.