Name Neil Gall | ||
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Education Gray's School of Art, Slade School of Fine Art | ||
Ian dawson and neil gall untitled
Neil Gall (born 1967 in Aberdeen, Scotland) is a painter based in London, working with a number of processes including modelling, assemblage, photography and painting. He received his BA in painting at Gray's School of Art and then attended Slade School of Art in London in 1991. He has received numerous awards including the Abby Major Award in 1993 from The British School at Rome, the Jerwood Painting Prize in 1999 and was the artist in residence at Durham Cathedral in 1993.
Contents
Gall’s paintings, when seen on their own, might be read as perverse abstractions; when his sculptures, often the basis for many of his paintings, are shown alongside, the interplay between 2 and 3 dimensions amplifies the oscillation between abstraction and figuration. He explores the interactions between surfaces: foils, plastic wrapping, velvet, tape and other variously textured materials, frequently alluding to an erotic connection. Stunning and unsettling, his paintings come alive with their photographic realism while others break down as collage with their cubist-like geometry. Only when they are encountered closely does the paint itself emerge as its own textural element and artistic agent. Gall confounds the viewer by removing collective reference points. These images are quotations of his own fantastical universes.
Gall is best known for his "S & M sculpture paintings", which echo the disquiet of Hans Belmer's dolls and conjure the debris of everyday life into stunted, contorted and amputated characters. They are tortured pictures of a tortuous process, fetish-objects in the cult of Gall’s own practice.
Selected exhibitions
Publications
2007 Neil Gall, Shelf Life, Published 2007, Publisher, Black Dog Publishing