Archive 2007-08
Neil Gall
- Venue: Fine Art Lecture Theatre
- Start: Wed, 23 Apr 2008 11:30:00 BST
- End: Wed, 23 Apr 2008 14:00:00 BST
Neil Gall is a painter based in London, working with a number of processes including modelling, assemblage, photography and painting. At times Neil Gall’s paintings seem to be referencing Dutch still life or surrealist landscapes, at others they appear to be entirely contemporary and without precedent. It is as though Gall has built up layers of art history with the illusory dexterity of paint itself.
This is in part due to the strata of his working process: modeling and assemblage, photography and painting. When the paintings are shown on their own they might be read as perverse abstractions; when, as here, the sculptures appear too, the interplay between two and three dimensions amplifies the oscillation between abstraction and figuration.
The sculptures make sense from a single viewpoint, like theatrical models.The shapes, colours and textures become a cast of characters, like dissipated masks and puppets or Paul Nash’s anthropomorphised driftwood. Gall’s spheres of wrapped tape, fluffy balls, globs of plasticine and mangled wire, however, create a tableau that is more involved in formal relationships than narrative. The push and pull of colour and shape finds its lineage in the paintings of Hans Hoffman, the tawdry manipulation of material in the mutilated dolls of Hans Ballmer. The final, photorealist execution of the paintings, on the other hand, places the work in another camp – the precise re-rendering of grunge may recall Glen Brown’s flattened Auerbachs or Will Cotton’s candy landscapes, but Gall confounds us by removing collective reference points. These are quotations of his own fantastical universes.
Gall is best known for his “S & M sculpture paintings”, which echo the disquiet of Hans Belmer’s dolls and conjure the debris of everyday life into stunted, contorted and amputated characters. They are tortured pictures of a tortuous process, fetish-objects in the cult of Gall’s own practice.