Nick Hornby: Zygotes and Confessions

About

This exhibition will re-open on Wednesday 19 May 2021.  Open: Tue–Sun 11am–4pm.

Hornby brings high-tech processes to figuration, pulling historical, material forms into the era of screen culture. His works defy conventional distinctions of form and media and  exhibit instead what Hornby terms ‘meta-cubism.’ In this pluralistic approach to perception neither image nor form takes centre stage. The sculptures are produced using digital and industrial processes, but retain the artist’s touch through their final process whereby a liquified image is applied to each work.

Gender and sexual identity are explored by the artist in this new series for the first time. Whilst Hornby’s work has previously resisted autobiographical connotations here he explores a sense of personal intimacy or ‘confessions.’ 

For all the connections between the form of his sculptures and their subject, Hornby’s work is also playfully evasive. This amplifies their fluidity while ideas of autobiography are complicated by collaboration. Nine of these new sculptures were made with the photographer Louie Banks, celebrated for his photographs  of  transgender models and drag queens. From a distance, the high gloss finish of the works  – morphing portrait busts and ‘mantelpiece dogs’ – have a compelling tactility. The flickering between and blurring of identities within Hornby’s sculptural works serves to bring another dimension to the genre of portraiture, shifting from sculpture to photography and back again, all the while seductive and elusive.

Curator: Alfredo Cramerotti, Director, MOSTYN

A monograph on Nick Hornby, edited by Matt Price, will be published by Anomie in 2021. An exhibition catalogue of Zygotes and Confessions is available for sale at MOSTYN shop from December 2020.

About the artist

Nick Hornby (b. 1980) is a British artist living and working in London. Hornby studied at Slade School of Art and Chelsea College of Art.  His work has been exhibited at Tate Britain, Southbank Centre London, Leighton House London, CASS Sculpture Foundation, Glyndebourne, Fitzwilliam Museum Cambridge, Museum of Arts and Design New York and Poznan Biennale, Poland.  Residencies include Outset (Israel), Eyebeam (USA), and awards include the UAL Sculpture Prize. His work has been reviewed in the New York Times, Frieze, Artforum, The Art Newspaper, The FT, and featured in Architectural Digest and Sculpture Magazine.