Nick Goss's mysterious and ethereal paintings layer images from contemporary culture, personal memories and historical events to collapse a sense of time, space and place.
Drawing on themes in his solo exhibition at Pallant House Gallery in 2019, this work Aloe Vera continues Goss' investigation of the city and his observations of everyday life. Brightly coloured details of a food stall in Ridley Road Market, close to the artist's studio in East London, feast the eyes in sharp focus. The objects from the contemporary market in the foreground are in collision with shards of a shattered landscape laden with water, conveying the sense that the image - and time - are slipping away from its mooring and us.
Goss is known for developing silkscreen compositions from photographic collages, which are created from his own snapshots and archive of found images. For Aloe Vera, a series of vintage images of a flood that devastated Florence in 1966 proved generative for Goss, who layers the submerged Italian city with London. Aloe Vera is powerful image that captures the essence of time and place - of where we are today and what we have lost, remembered, imagined and re-imagined.
Nick Goss (b. 1981, Bristol) is an Anglo-Dutch painter who lives and works in London. Goss studied at the Slade School of Fine Art and the Royal Academy. He was featured in The Drawing Room Biennial in 2013 and The Drawing Room exhibition Tan Lines in 2014. Goss has exhibited widely in Europe and America and his work is held 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 Gallery, Chichester.