Max Wigram Gallery is proud to present the second solo exhibition by London-based artist Barnaby Hosking.

Since his graduation in 2003, Hosking has gained acclaim for an original practice, which brings together the rigorous formalism of American 1960s minimalist art with subject matters of an emotional nature.

In this exhibition, Hosking will present three new works that comprise of videos projected onto black velvet, which are accompanied by achromatic sculptures or paintings. The films describe the process through which the artist has made these objects delineating with their narrative the duality between process and object. Hosking’s works gather strength by giving equal importance to the simultaneous presence of all these elements, while leaving their relationship open-ended. Scenes from Snow Painting Once Removed describe the artist in the furthest point of Northern Europe, the Norwegian island Nordkapp, while caught up in the struggle of painting en plein air. In the middle of an epic endeavour, these play with the image of the “misanthropist artist” in search of a particular kind of snow, where he is seen in a landscape covered by white deep snow, working the black canvas’ thick impasto and performing its whiteout. In the lineage of Bruce Nauman’s and Samuel Beckett’s work, Hosking carries on their self-interrogation on artistic activity on the one side by experimenting with the venerable tradition of casting and, on the other, charging his m14otifs with erotic tension as it appears in Reclining Figure. Here, “the artist”’s obsession with his model leads him to the creation of a clay figure, starting with its simple outline to keeping it alive with a watering can, before painting on a white rubber mould in preparation for casting.  

The meditative span with which the artist applies whites onto blacks in an effort to physically isolate objects from their surroundings, the presence of a quiet cast lying on the floor, the strictly monochromatic colour of each work, all these elements respect the gallery’s physical properties of silence and whiteness to elaborate a visual cartography that feels like a caress.

Born in 1976 in Norwich, Norfolk (UK), in 2004 Hosking has taken part in group exhibitions in the UK and internationally including Northern Light, The Rubell Collection, Miami; Expander, Royal Academy of Arts, London and New Blood, The Saatchi Gallery, London. In 2003 he won the Credit Suisse Bank Prize.  Forthcoming exhibitions include An Essential Solitude,,  Upstairs, Berlin, 2006.