Nicky Hodge / Only a moon to soup her

About

Nicky Hodge’s recent paintings take Gertrude Stein’s Tender Buttons as a starting point. In this experimental text, Stein pushes abstraction to the limit seeing words purely as words allowing them to pop up like strangers in unexpected combinations. In Only a moon to soup her, Hodge’s work follows two recent trains of thought. In the first series of small paintings in acrylic, the works are quickly made, relying on gesture and the space that surrounds them. In Little Belgians, the second series, oil paintings jostle in a small group, creating meaning through their interrelationships and their involuntary titles.

Writing about Hodge’s paintings in 2012, critic Libby Anson noted how Hodge sees her work as ‘a collapse between the idea of painting and drawing, exploring a psychological terrain through an active engagement with the struggle of its making. She is not trying to recreate anything in the real world, rather she is illustrating a state of mind ... What determines that or that shape cannot be predetermined or defined. The process is as abstract as the shapes that appear to be the subject’. 

NICKY HODGE lives in London. She graduated from Central St Martin’s in 1992. Confinement, a series of 80 compressed charcoal drawings housed in perspex boxes, was selected for Reclaiming the Madonna, a show that toured to five UK cities in 1994-95. Her paintings were included in the group shows Outdoors (2006), Sense and Nonsense (2003), Bittersweet (2001) at Danielle Arnaud Contemporary Art, where she also had a solo exhibition in 2001. In 2007 she co-curated Close at Hand at Contemporary Art Projects in Hoxton. In 2012 she had an exhibition in Abergavenny, Wales; co-curated Grave Passions, an event in Nunhead Cemetery, and was selected for Deptford X. Recent exhibitions and projects include Small World, Deptford X (2015), Tremulous, Asylum Chapel, Peckham (2015) and Mountains out of Molehills, Café Viva, Peckham (2014). Her video Lifting Belly is all there was shown in Alpha Futura Nova in Berlin and Chelsea College of Art in 2013.