Nick Goss: Margaritas at the Mall

Songs for South London

In his new paintings, Nick Goss seems to be aiming at the mode of memory - how it inevitably contains more than one place and more than one logic at any given time. On the other hand, it is easy to recognise in Nick Goss's work the logic of modernist collage or the cubist compulsion to cut things apart. In his painting "Last of England", a group of people are wedged into the canvas in a manner reminiscent of the Weimar Republic, as if you were looking at them in a cracked mirror - a bag, a scarf, something carried under the arm are all parts on the same flat plane. If you look at them for longer, the effect is not one of alienation or disorientation, as in Höch's surreal assemblages or Kirchner's brittle street landscapes. I see the people in Nick Goss's new pictures more as strangers in whom someone quietly believes, who are endowed with dignity. The fragmentation in these works could therefore be better understood as a kind of sampling, as in music. There is humour in this distancing, as there is in Goss's paintings, and there is much more hidden behind what we see, however flat or rotten or futile it may seem. It was fun in Bowling Alley, until it wasn't ... or was it?

Exhibition:
CFA Contemporary Fine Arts Berlin, 4/9 - 16/10/2021