Nick Dawes South Africa, b. 1969

With Trace Elements, KORNFELD Gallery presents a solo exhibition by London-based artist Nick Dawes (b. 1969, Johannesburg), bringing together new works from his current phase of practice. Curated by Charles Moore, the exhibition is dedicated to a painterly approach that consciously resists the visual acceleration of the present, placing time, materiality, and attention at its core.

Nick Dawes’ works are created by pouring thin layers of paint onto untreated canvas. Transparency, layering, and a visibly inscribed temporal dimension shape the surfaces of the paintings. Color appears not as a decorative element, but as a structuring principle. The painterly process remains openly legible, lending the works a quiet yet intense presence.

Conceptually, Dawes’ work enters into a contemporary dialogue with key positions of postwar abstract painting such as Ed Clark, Mark Rothko, and Sam Gilliam, without citing them directly. His painting carries forward their inquiries into color, space, and materiality with consistency and clarity, asserting the continued relevance of painting as a site of concentrated perception and temporal experience.

Tammam Azzam, Elvira Bach, Stéphane Couturier, Nick Dawes, Paris Giachoustidis, Hubertus Hamm, Natela Iankoshvili, Rusudan Khizanishvili, Franziska Klotz, Tamara Kvesitadze, Christopher Lehmpfuhl, David Meskhi, Susanne Roewer, Hubert Scheibl, Martin Spengler, Jan Tichy, Ivana de Vivanco
Galerie Kornfeld is delighted to announce it's ten year anniversary exhibition, wich will feature the artists that have come along with us through the decade. The anniversary exhibition will reveal touching glimpses of the past and the future, sensitive and exciting exchanges between first artistic attempts and more mature works. The works on show hint at inner struggle and transformation, the eternal search for what is hidden behind the visible.

In his colourfield canvases, the artist strives for a new quality of painterly abstraction. His ability to control complex tonal arrangements and the juxtaposition of irregular shapes give his works their unique and striking appeal. The unified flatness of his paintings also contrive to present us with various possibilities of space – of proximity and distance. Each point sends us shuttling to another area of colour, which in turn persuades us to examine yet a third, and so on. Every painting Nick Dawes creates represents the time it was made in, how he felt and what his influences were in this particular moment. The impossibility of ever recreating this exact emotional state makes each work unique.

Hiba Alansari, Tammam Azzam, Stéphane Couturier, Nick Dawes, Farshad Farzankia, Hubertus Hamm, Rusudan Khizanishvili, Vera Pagava
Shutdown. Lockdown. Confirmations. Cancellations.
That might happen from time to time, the gallerist thinks. Occasionally an artist or a collector might cancel. This time, however, it's a collective, worldwide cancellation. And he tries to understand current events, just as the friends of art seek to read and interpret images. And the gallerist thinks. Cancel? Confirm? He thinks: These extraordinary times offer us the opportunity to pause momentarily, to reflect on what really matters, to feel what is taking place and to become aware of the consequences. At least from time to time.

Nick Dawes creates complex colour arrangements with fluid forms and thus pursues a new quality of painterly abstraction. The ostensibly impulsive painterly gestures of his paintings are, however, achieved by an exact plan that leaves almost nothing to chance. The artist distils abstract forms from the formal particularities of road signs or other sign-like quotidian objects, which he then captures as pencil drawings and transfers to the canvas with thinned poured oil paint. In Susanne Roewer’s works, glass joins silver-plated bronze to such an extent that the transparent glass corpus adapts to the solid metal and thus reflects on its own process of formation. The glass is blown in temperatures over 1000 °C and shaped on the bronze corpus, and in its amorphous structure adjusts to the metal.

To lean and to prop are the two behaviour patterns that Dawes allows, indeed welcomes to the canvas in his working process. His painting process is usually a lengthy one, which involves a gradual distillation of everything that makes a scene memorable: mood and atmosphere, feeling and emotions, bodily sensation and state of mind. In Dawes’s case, succession is signified physically by various means: by then overlay of one colour on another, by the orchestration and direction of the poured lines and shapes, by the implied sequential movements of the painter’s hand.