Max Wigram Gallery is pleased to announce Barnaby Hosking’s third solo exhibition at the gallery.

Hosking is best known for video installations that chart the process of artistic creation, and its manifestation as sculpture or painting. The simultaneous presentation of the video and the object of production destabilises any reductive sense of what constitutes an artwork, opening up a space of contemplation in which the viewer’s emotional and physical responses are brought to the fore. Informed by Eastern philosophy, Hosking’s practice pivots around the elementary components of light and darkness invoking a space of stillness and meditation.

Netsuke is inspired by the Japanese carving tradition, from which it takes its name. The video shows a hut, constructed with black canvases, nestling in a rural landscape. Inside, the artist toils over a miniature carving, lit by a shaft of light piecing the otherwise total darkness. The video is projected as a ‘spot’ onto two of the screens used in original hut structure and its movement describes the arc made by the beam of light.

Informed by Minimalism and the concerns of Reinhardt and others, Hosking’s work emphasizes the surface of the canvas, by projecting onto it, whilst simultaneously proposing it as an abstract depth or void. The haptic quality of the velvet surface softens the image, intensifying its visceral presence.

Hosking’s ongoing interest in landscape emerges from a quest for solitude. Isolated in the boundlessness of the ‘great outdoors’ his practice recalls the pioneers of the 19th Century and the Romantic sublime, evoking a sense of awe within the immensity of the landscape.

Untitled is comprised of a monochromatic painting, and a video of the sky during ‘magic hour’ – the transitional time between dusk and total darkness. The stillness of the video’s unbroken surface is disturbed intermittently by a passing bird – suggestive of emerging and receding thoughts. The image undulates between materiality (the representation of a sky), and the evocative qualities of an abstract sublime (a luminosity or ambience). The work considers the transcendental and metaphysical associations of Minimalism, in attempting to express “not what is seen, but what is known forever in the mind”*.

Hosking’s repertoire strikes a dialogue with seemingly oppositional moments of art history: the expressionism of outdoor landscape painting; the austerity of minimalist abstraction. Formally, the work refuses the containment of any one category, combining sculpture, painting, figuration and abstraction. Rather than asserting a position between binary terms, Hosking weaves these components together.
*Agnes Martin

Barnaby Hosking (b. 1976, Norwich, UK) lives and works in London. This year his work was exhibited at York Art Gallery, (York, UK) and he will participate in an A-Foundation / Grizedale Arts project at the Royal Academy, London. Exhibitions in 2007 included a solo exhibition at Almine Rech Gallery (Paris). Hosking’s work has been shown at: the Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art (US, 2006); in the 2nd Moscow Biennial (Russia, 2007); Imagination Becomes Reality (Part V) at the Goetz Collection (Munich); ZKM (Karlsruhe); the 2006 Echigo – Tsumari Art Triennial (Japan); Northern Light at The Rubell Family Collection (Miami, 2004); New Blood at The Saatchi Gallery (London, 2004).

Further information: Gina Buenfeld at gina@maxwigram.com or +44 (0) 20 7495 4960