Friday Focus: Neil Gall
Born in 1967 in Aberdeen, Scotland, Neil Gall currently lives and works in London. He received his BA in Painting at Gray’s School of Art and then attended Slade School of Art in London, 1991–1993.
His art has garnered him numerous awards including an Abbey Major Award, British School at Rome, 1993– 1994. In 1996–1997 he was the Artist-in-Residence at Durham Cathedral. He has shown in galleries and institutions worldwide, including the exhibitions Art on Paper since 1960, The British Museum, London, 2022-23; FIGURE/S: Drawing after Bellmer, Drawing Room, London,2021; Embracing Modernism: Ten Years of Drawing Acquisitions, the Morgan Library, New York, 2015; A Sense of Things, Zabludowicz Collection, London, 2014; Watching Me Watching You, Denver Art Museum, Denver, Colorado, 2011; Undone: Making and Unmaking in Contemporary Sculpture, Henry Moore Institute, Leeds, 2010; and Something Less, Something More, David Roberts Art Foundation, London, 2008.
Recent solo exhibitions include Covers and Counterfeits, The MAC, Belfast, 2018, The Studio: Cover Versions, Henry Moore Institute, Leeds, 2018, Against Nature, Aurel Scheibler, Berlin in 2018 and Cut-Outs, Offcuts and Holes, David Nolan Gallery, New York, 2015. Gall has been the subject of three monographs; Neil Gall, Drawing (Ridinghouse, 2020, with texts by Lexi Lee Sullivan, George Newall and Alexander Ross), Neil Gall: Works 2007–2011 (Hatje Cantz, 2012, with text by Nicholas Cullinan) and Neil Gall: Shelf Life (Black Dog Publishing, 2007, with texts by Simon Groom, Charles Darwent and Johanna Malt).
Collections include: Aberdeen City Art Gallery, British Museum, London, David Roberts Arts Foundation, London, Denver Art Museum, Colorado, The Georgia Museum of Art, Athens, Hiscox, London, Insinger De Beaufort, London, Leeds City Art Gallery, The Morgan Library & Museum, New York, Royal Scottish Academy, Edinburgh, Christen Sveaas Art Collection, Oslo, Simmons & Simmons, London, and The Zabludowicz Art Trust, London.
Can you tell me about your practice? How do you get started on a piece of work?
Well, I always start with some kind of object,I hesitate to call ‘sculpture’. I make things roughly and quickly that are sources for either a painting or drawing. Later on I might make a mould of the object, cast it in jesmonite or resin and paint it to look like the original, at this point I’ll call the ‘thing’ a sculpture. I’ve been working this way for over 20 years.
Who or what are your biggest influences?
Painting’s own history is what informs any painters work, you don’t start from year zero there is no Tabula rasa. My biggest influences? Some are obvious others less so. If I made a Venn diagram of influence it might include Trompe- l’oeil, Cubism, Surrealism and Pop art, but the biggest factor in how I think about putting paintings together really comes from Abstraction and its particular histories. At The Slade, Ian Mckeever was my tutor, he made a huge impact on me and in fact if you look at a painting of mine, how space weaves in and out revealing gaping holes into the nether regions of the picture plane, then I think you can still see his influence today. I mean I should qualify this a little, if you look at my paintings sometimes they are overtly figurative, representations of anthropomorphic and often biomorphic objects, concurrently I’ll make works that might look at first glance as being in the realms of abstraction. It’s the latter group that relate to Ian, who is resolutely an ‘abstract’ painter. I’ve realised in recent years that the two polarities can happily co-exist, I see visual correlations between the volumetric and spherical in the object paintings and the holes or voids in the abstracts. I figure they are just different ways of manipulating space. If I keep to artists who have influenced me then I might add Rauschenberg (his combines), Frank Stella (nearly everything) and Alberto Burri, Hepworth and Moore (all for their holes!).
The use of everyday materials to play with perception is central to your work, can you talk further about this?
At the beginning a lot of the stuff I used for the objects were horrible bits of plastic and junk that came with the joys of parenthood. However much one fought it and of course we thought we would be different, the deluge was hard to stop: Plastic toys, Lego, Playmobil for example but also craft shop kinds of things, coloured card, plasticene, glittery things, all sorts that cluttered the house and seeped into the studio and eventually into the work. As my children got older the nature of the rubbish shifted and eventually I was left with the stuff that was much less to do with early childhood. The work subsequently moved from having a slightly Poppy, consumerist angle into explorations of the abject or uncanny. More recently I’ve focussed on the development of a language of mutated abstraction that has its origins in the mundane.
I don’t really go out of my way to find materials or stuff I might want to work with. I kind of let it all just happen organically. It always seems to be a bit boring or obvious if I try and contrive things. Making the objects always seems to happen in an off-hand way when I’m least expecting it. I would find it difficult to get out of bed on a Monday morning, go to the studio at 9am and start wrapping up some ping-pong balls in tape or perhaps get my plasticene out and do a bit of modelling, you know, it would not seem a terribly grown-up way to start the week. It’s really a case of doing things at odd moments in between painting sessions and with only half an idea in mind. It’s an intuitive process that I find liberating and is in direct contrast to the more time-consuming, labour-intensive process of making a painting over many weeks. Both activities I get a kick out of doing.
Lots of things are important in the studio but just to say something... well here is one indispensable object: an old hand-held mirror my wife used for make-up. I hold it up to my eye to view the painting in reverse and check the drawing looks correct. It gives a fresh perspective; I figure if it looks ok in reverse then it’s probably ok the right way around. I’ve always done this, even back in art school...I guess someone must have told me about it’s benefits, and a few other students used to do it. I’m not sure many do today though. I’ve been external assessor at the Art school in Dublin for 4 years and have yet to see anyone scrunching one eye shut to a small mirror standing with their back to their painting making odd noises whilst trying to work out if a line looks best concave or convex!
The Sight of Death by T.J Clark. He calls it an experiment in art writing, and it’s about looking at paintings without too much thought about their cultural history, looking really at the material facts and nuances to present a picture about the art work’s visual and material character. He focuses on two particular paintings by Poussin an artist not known for painterly flourish but whose sensitivity to the nuances and detail of the paintings surface are just as interesting as say Velazquez or Rembrandt. My own paintings require the viewer at some point to stick their nose quite close to the surface where they will realise that all the tiny little squirms and smears are small accumulations of brush marks that are of interest and of importance to the surface tension of the image, all of which is lost on the computer screen and actually even at 5 feet from the picture. Clark makes you realise that the ‘painterly’ isn’t always an obvious thing, easily manifest in a big brushy gesture but that it can be something that is subtle and which unfolds slowly with intense looking.
Finally, is there anything new coming up that you would like to tell us about?
March has had a few things happening, the end of a show at the British Museum, Art on paper since 1960 that included a large drawing of mine from the collection. https://www.britishmuseum.org/exhibitions/art-paper-1960-hamish-parker-collection
An exhibition in Maastricht as an adjunct to TEFAF with Emanuel von Baeyer .
https://evbaeyer.com/special/andrieskapel-maastricht-9-19-march-2023/page-1/
Art Dusseldorf opens where I will show some work with Aurel Scheibler.
‘Etat des lieux’ is a group show in Paris curated by Winnie Mo Rielly and Cham Lavant, opens end of March and will feature a painting of mine. 339 Ter Rue de Belleville, 75019, Paris. PV 23rd March
March also sees the release of my first lithograph in collaboration with Lee Turner, Hole Editions, Newcastle. https://holeeditions.wordpress.com/