'Country Life' Tom Bull / Nicholas Johnson

About

Artvisor is delighted to host the exhibition Country Life, featuring works by Tom Bull and Nicholas Johnson, taking place at an off-site space in Fitzrovia from 15 December 2023 until February 2024.

Conceived by Tom Bull and Piero Tomassoni, this exhibition transforms a domestic setting near Regent Street into an eerie space of sensory overload. Tom Bull’s site-specific new installation, Country Life, together with Nicholas Johnson’s large-scale botanic paintings, turns the main exhibition room into an immersive environment.

Johnson's works delve into the detailed world of plants, highlighting the beauty and complexity of nature through vibrant colours and meticulous attention to detail. Bull challenges traditions, lore, and genre through sculptural and video installations that connect to the themes of land, nature, and humanity.

Tom Bull (b. 1995, UK) is a sculpture and installation artist whose work addresses the complex and often unsettling nature of urban and suburban living in current times. Drawing inspiration from the landscapes of folklore, urbanisation, and ritualism, Bull investigates the intricate interplay between fiction and representation, violence and sensitivity, truth and mythology. His sculptures are a testament to his skilful craftsmanship and ability to convey profound meaning through objects that lie at the intersection between art, architecture, and design.

Nicholas Johnson (b. 1982, Hawaii) is a London-based artist who approaches plant form as a subject of metaphysical enquiry. He has investigated this subject for over ten years with a variety of optical and conceptual variations. With methods as diverse as music transposed from thorns on rose branches, vibratory acid palettes, fractal repetition of plant form, and recently, 3D animation. It is Johnson’s ongoing thesis that there is something innate in botanical form that is inextricably linked to ours (human) and other life’s perceptual mechanics.

Country Life establishes a remarkable correlation between an exploration of human ambiguities and plant consciousness, drawing viewers into the precarious world these artists have built individually and now merged into one site-specific space, creating an atmosphere of tension and slippage of fiction and representation.