The Near and Elsewhere

Based in Bermondsey, British artist Nick Goss paints narrative scenes that capture fragmentary spaces and liminal states of mind. He develops his compositions from photographic collages, made from a combination of his own snapshots and found images, which he then translates into watercolour studies before transferring his ideas to canvas. He plays with processes of erasure, washing out figurative elements and often exposing the raw linen beneath the painterly surface. Drawing upon a wide range of literary and artistic influences – including James Ensor, Paul Klee and Diego Rivera – Goss’s work has been likened to that of his predecessor Peter Doig, whose explorations of the relationship between memory and paint form an important precedent. Based on a photograph taken at a fairground in Bolivia, The Near and Elsewhere (2009) is an early work depicting a piazza in the midst of a jungle, haunted by a faint statue of Mickey Mouse. The familiar and the uncertain collide in a surreal, dreamlike haze, riddled with gaps, blank passages and fluid washes of colour. ‘I guess at a basic level they’re psychological spaces’, Goss explains of his works, ‘playing around with a sense of the uncanny.’ A graduate of the Royal Academy Schools, the artist mounted his first solo museum exhibition last year at Pallant House Gallery, Chichester.