Nigel Hall: My Choice

Nigel Hall: My Choice is an exhibition featuring work selected by the artist to highlight key stages and developments in his career, spanning from the mid 1960s through to present day. This marks his thirteenth solo show with Annely Juda Fine Art, his first exhibition with the gallery being in 1978.

Hall’s original subject was landscape and continues to be a frequent source of inspiration. His interest is not in portraying a recognisable place but evoking the remembered sensations of being in a physical space, where sculptural forms represent the essential and elemental. Hall has said “My work has always been about place…. I am fascinated by the way geometry can be discerned in landscape.” His images and motifs may be essentially abstract and geometric but are inspired and informed by the natural world.

The works, both two dimensional and three dimensional explore the relationship of mass to void, and of the seen and the implied. What is omitted is as important as what is retained. His sculptures, fabricated in steel, aluminium, bronze and birch plywood give as much emphasis to the way in which they encircle and enclose ‘empty’ space as they do to the constructed material parts.

Drawings are of equal importance to sculpture in Hall’s practice and are usually developed in colour and charcoal. Images emerge slowly and the preliminary stages are retained in the faint charcoal lines and dust that ground the image on the paper. The intensity of the black is achieved through multiple layers of charcoal. Colour is essentially the result of mood and experiment.

Central to Hall’s work is the way in which his sculptural forms alter the viewers perception of space and volume as the viewer moves around the work. This awareness with the human relation to form and scale – to distance and to our sense of the vertical and horizontal in landscape – is central and runs throughout his work.

Free

Tuesday – Friday 10am – 5.30pm. Saturday 11am – 5pm.