17 June - 29 July SIMON NICHOLAS : Paintings

Please click here for the exhibition catalogue.

Working within a set of almost mathematically rigorous constraints, Nicholas has created works of paradoxical richness and depth. Painted in warm reds, ochres, greens, blues and gold, Nicholas's interiors, exteriors and crane shots of thickly populated masses of people and objects create giddy sensations of colour, movement and scale of a fictitious world of abstract patterns.

When asked to name artists who have influenced him Nicholas talks of his admiration for Velazquez's painting 'The Royal Boar Hunt' in the National Gallery, London, with its remarkable representation of crowds, its multiple perspectives and light sources.

By contrast, Nicholas describes the depiction of crowds in his paintings as "an unchoreographed dance performed by pedestrians in big cities who swarm around each other but never collide". Despite their apparent similarity to many familiar buildings and streets, the paintings have little to do with any specific location. Dense city-scapes with vertiginous architectural spaces, Nicholas's recent works have been transformed into urban landscapes of regimented vertical and horizontal lines of people and objects; cars in a car park, figures on a beach, and aeroplanes on landing strips, for example.

If Europe needed competition for Wayne Thiebaud's dizzying perspectives of San Francisco, Simon Nicholas, with his deceptively regimented images, would prove formidable. 

Image: Car Park 6, 2006, Oil on linen, 145 x 155 cm, © Simon Nicholas

Opening Times:

Telephone: 020 7520 1485

Fax: 020 7520 1487

Email: kpg@kingsplace.co.uk

Kings Place Gallery / Bookshop / Balcony North Gallery:

Monday - Friday 10 am - 6 pm

Saturday - Sunday 12 am - 6 pm

Admission free