NEIL GALL: Cut-Outs, Offcuts and Holes

David Nolan Gallery is pleased to present Cut-Outs, Offcuts and Holes, an exhibition of recent paintings and drawings by British artist Neil Gall. For his third solo exhibition at the gallery, we will present eleven paintings and four large works on paper.

Gall’s works typically engage a range of cultural and art historical references, all of which operate within his own unique and precisely determined visual language. In recent years, the artist has developed a highly skillful and virtuosic approach to painting and drawing, which involves a precise rendering of loosely constructed maquettes, assembled using colored tape, translucent cellophane, ping-pong balls and other materials that he finds in his studio. Gall uses the motif of the ping-pong ball to suggest a variety of associations: in some cases they are treated like eyes, brazenly staring back at the viewer – in others, they become subtle references to Magritte, whose paintings employed similar spherical forms hovering ambiguously in space. In their coloring, Gall’s new paintings collectively reference the histories of Monochrome painting, most notably Barnett Newman’s seminal series “Who's Afraid of Red, Yellow and Blue.”

Gall selects particular titles for his paintings as a way to reframe the viewer’s interpretation of given works. Frequently in his titles, the artist makes allusions to art historical sources, among them Velázquez, Bronzino, Magritte, and his abiding influence, Poussin. In so doing, Gall playfully resituates the works within a longer narrative of Western culture. One work Allegory (Bronzino), 2015, thus becomes a conceptual re-working of Bronzino’s Allegory with Venus and Cupid, 1545, in the National Gallery in London. In Gall’s painting, Bronzino’s vibrant blue coloring finds new application, while a constellation of ping-pong balls form a substitute for Venus and Cupid’s fleshy forms.

In Kitchen (Velázquez), 2015, Gall pays homage to Velázquez’s An Old Woman Cooking Eggs, 1618 (a painting in the National Galleries of Scotland). Like the Old Master, Gall delights in the life-like depiction of everyday objects, the contrast between different materials, and the play of light and shadow on opaque and reflective surfaces. While the title triggers an initial association, the artist is interested in the way that multiple references can exist in tandem. The softly delineated bands of muted color recall the work of the American abstract painter Agnes Martin, and elsewhere the artist has also compared these forms to the “achrome” paintings of Piero Manzoni. In this approach, Gall conveys a willfully varied engagement with art historical sources, layering and compacting these as he chooses. Occasionally more obscure cultural histories are summoned, as in his painting I’m So Green, 2015, which takes its title from a song by the German “Krautrock” band Can. Cutting and pasting from an array of sources, the works in this exhibition exist within the diverse realms of representational painting, abstraction and the materiality of post-minimalist sculpture.