Nick Malone // A Tale of Two Lives
Tuesday 14th to Friday 25th March 2017
Venue: Project Space, 183 – 185 Bermondsey Street
Opening Times: Tuesday – Saturday, 11am – 6pm
This exhibition at Project Space on Bermondsey Street, features a series of new paintings by Nick Malone inspired by the in-the-making graphic novel The Disappearance of Makepiece – A Tale of Two Lives.
The walls of the main gallery are dominated by large, three-dimensional works of burnt wood and drawing on canvas that depict an inner mythology through dissolving planes. These seem to occupy a third space between drawing and sculpture, to be engaged with on their own terms of visual dynamics and broken narrative, without any need to go further.
However, leading from this area is a far smaller space that provides a completely different environment. It refers to a moment in a graphic novel currently being written by Nick Malone – The Disappearance of Makepeace: A Tale of Two Lives – which centres around the strange disappearance and lifelong search for its mysterious hero. This moment is the visitor’s entry into the hidden room that had been used by Makepeace himself, holding his sketchbooks and notes on a central table, with further work on the walls of the room, and a background soundscape of narrative and poetry* drawn from the novel.
Trapdoors into Makepeace’s world open as windows cut into the pages through which other worlds of imagination can be seen. In this way the text of the graphic novel sets the exhibition within a wider context of narrative, adventure and dream, incorporating images of the works in the main gallery into an examination through story of ambiguity, dissolution and change.
This show is pivotal in the development of Nick Malone’s art, from earlier, structured work such as his exhibition Balkan Earth for the British Council Greece, through his manipulated canvases of liquid acrylic, to these radical, new constructions with soundscape, text and narrative.
About Art Bermondsey Project Space
An independent gallery sponsored by Olympus, part of a Cultural Initiative Programme in association with State Magazine. The Project Space is a not-for-profit platform supporting the fusion of art, photography and culture. Three gallery spaces, three floors, across three thousand square feet of a former 19th Century paper manufacturers with a dedicated video-screening suite – the Art Bermondsey Project Space is one of London’s most dynamic contemporary art spaces.
* Part of this text is taken from Nick Malone’s prizewinning book Jason Smith’s Nocturnal Opera, written with the support of Arts Council England and published by the Cinnamon Press
Image: © Nick Malone Where a Squadrons of Insects…
