Newcastle University

Central to Nick Fox’s painting practice is his fascination with social codes, and subversive narratives of romantic idealization, often in the context of made objects, drawing and installation. His visual research explores representational and material orthodoxies in painting languages through a tentative craft of hand, as much as through his erotic visual narratives and symbolic references to romantic desire and explicit eroticism.

Building on delicate relationships between fine art and craft, his dense painted panels and intricately cut acrylic objects are often contextualised by weaving together historical ciphers, cultural reference and artefact, domestic readings, and craft languages.

Fox’s upcoming Solo exhibition ‘Phantasieblume’, at Vane (Newcastle) reveals this aesthetic exploration of material and image, through which a nostalgic desire for a decadent Fin de Siècle encoding of oppressed sexuality unfolds and is made potent. The first version of Phantasieblume took place at Centre for Recent Drawing, London in 2009. Previous projects include Unveiled with Francis Picabia at MOCA London, New Paintings at the Royal Academy Schools Gallery, London, Vanitas, Raid Projects, Los Angeles and Phantasieblume at the Centre for Recent Drawing. In 2007, he has selected for the Jerwood Contemporary Painters, a national touring exhibition whose aim is talent, excellence and a wider discourse in contemporary painting.