Neil Gall: Covers and Counterfeits

About

Gall’s works open up worlds that lie between reality and imagination. Fanciful, sometimes mysterious arrangements of everyday objects, toys, plasticine, cardboard, threads, and adhesive tape serve as models, which Gall depicts with an uncanny accuracy in his paintings and drawings.

With his most recent painting series, Neil Gall’s work has taken a new turn, the focus shifting to pure colour and form. With a formal reference to both Illusionism and Hard Edge painting styles, Gall’s works appear at first sight as large paper collages.

The paintings in this exhibition play with the illusion of cut-outs; the meticulously painted holes, shadows and apparent kinks perfectly imitating the materiality of paper. The flowing and filmy applied paints demonstrate a rich colour palette, which was inspired by covers of the famous art magazine The Studio from 1940s and 1950s.

While maintaining the connection to the real world, Gall’s paintings are still abstract in their subject. They show a fascinating formal quality and beauty of craft and stay open to various interpretations. Having the gallery walls as a background, the apparent cut-outs deceive the viewer with the illusion of trompe-l’oeil. The painting is thus an object and its depiction at the same time.

Alongside these paintings, this exhibition will feature a series of collages using the original covers of The Studio. Densely layered and processed with scissors, pencil and marker, they explore a variety of forms and colour combinations. Also included in the exhibition are a number of new drawings which are highly detailed which mirror and encapsulate the material concerns evident in Gall’s work.