Curated by Melissa Blanchflower (Serpentine Gallery, London)

Imagined floods and submerged landscapes form the catalyst for this new series of paintings and drawings which encapsulate the impermanence of our surroundings.

Nick Goss collapses time and place by filtering images of contemporary London and personal memories, with documentary photographs of historic floods in the Netherlands and Florence to create places that are simultaneously familiar and intangible. This sense of displacement is sharpened by layering and combining screen-print with painting and a heightened colour palette that borders on that of a dream or apparition. Water is a reoccurring theme in Goss’ practice with a rich connection to art history and literature, and for him the idea of looking beneath the surface of water is reminiscent of the act of painting itself. JG Ballard’s 1962 apocalyptic novel The Drowned World, remains a constant reference point to his work in its depiction of London as a tropical lagoon, overgrown by nature.

These new paintings by Goss remind us that climate change and particularly coastal erosion, an important issue for East Devon, are making us consider serious social and environmental change. 

Nick Goss (b. 1981, Bristol, UK) is an Anglo-Dutch artist and studied at the Slade and Royal Academy Schools, London. Recent solo exhibitions include Josh Lilley, London, Simon Preston, New York, and Contemporary Fine Arts, Berlin. His first institutional survey, Morley’s Mirror at Pallant House, Chichester in 2019, was accompanied by a catalogue co-published with Koenig Books, London.

Image: Collage © Nick Goss