Nick Dawes – Between Boundaries
Galerie Kornfeld is pleased to present the solo exhibition Between Boundaries by British artist Nick Dawes.
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 presents various possibilities of space—of proximity and distance. Each point sends the viewer shuttling to another area of colour, which in turn persuades examination of yet another. Every painting Nick Dawes creates represents the time it was made in: how he felt and what his influences were at that particular moment. The impossibility of ever recreating this exact emotional state makes each work unique.
The works themselves begin as small drawings and sketches based on texts appropriated from driving instruction manuals and other sign-like quotidian objects. The structure slowly dissolves as colours begin to penetrate and pour, blurring the boundaries between functionality and abstraction. Once solid components flow into a new vocabulary of fluid entities.
Working on unprimed canvases, the artist pours heavily thinned industrial oil paint directly onto the surface. Although the directions are pre-planned in earlier drawings, this process creates the potential for unpredictability. As different colour fields begin to overlap in a kind of expanded watercolour aesthetic, the oil separates from its core, creating atmospheric halos around each shape.
Initial colours partially or completely disappear behind subsequent layers of paint, producing a story that is told and untold at the same time. This reflects the variety of human communication—how we introduce ourselves, tell our stories, and slowly open up to one another, while leaving hints of what remains unsaid. It is an endless process of giving and taking: communication in all its potential and its limitations. To fully discover a Nick Dawes painting, one must engage in this deeper conversation and uncover the many layers within.
“In painting, space and form are not actual, as they are in sculpture, but illusory. Painting, indeed, is essentially an art of illusion; and ‘pictorial science’ is simply that accumulated knowledge which enables the painter to control this illusion, the illusion of forms in space. But the secret of good painting—of whatever age or school—lies in its adjustment of an inescapable dualism: on the one hand there is the illusion, indeed the sensation, of depth; and on the other there is the physical reality of the flat picture surface.”
— Patrick Heron, Space and Colour, 2001
Nick Dawes lives and works in London. He completed a BA in Fine Art at Brighton Polytechnic in 1992 after a foundation course at the Gloucestershire College of Art and Technology. In 2006, he was nominated for the Celeste Art Prize. His work has been shown in numerous exhibitions, including Galerie Kornfeld and 68projects in Berlin, Cell Project Space in London, Gallery Lucy Mackintosh in Lausanne, the John Hansard Gallery in Southampton, and at international art fairs such as Art021 Shanghai, Expo Chicago, and Untitled Miami. His works are held in public and private collections in Germany, Europe, and internationally, including the Chrysler Museum in Norfolk.
