For his second exhibition at Matthew Brown and his first presentation in New York since 2016, British artist Nick Goss is showing Stations, a group of new paintings and works on paper inspired by a journey to the historical Belgian coastal resort of Ostend.
"Little by little Ostend has become the unofficial rendezvous-location for the real and bogus aristocracy that one sees floating like a spume above the waves of capitals, everywhere encountering and recognizing itself, and for whom a home-town is merely a station in transit from which they seek to reach the great international centers of pleasure."—Stefan Zweig, The Season in Ostend (1902)
The idea of the journey, of stations and harbors encountered along the way and the crowds of people that pass through them, has long been a fascination for artists. Goss travelled to Ostend by bus and ferry in the summer of 2024 to spend time in a place still marked by wartime trauma and the lingering traces of a once-glamorous, cosmopolitan age. He was drawn as much by its artistic past, and figures such as James Ensor and Léon Spilliaert who have informed the condition and vocabulary of his own painting. Goss made sketches while walking through its streets, past the beach, hotels, casinos, and the deserted racetrack, and inside some of the bars that line the seafront. While many of these places appear in the new paintings — from Sunday Morning in Leopold Park, Visitation and Hotel Pacific to Mariakerke Beach, whose composition is borrowed from a 19th century etching that Goss found at the Ensor house-museum — the works themselves are not documentary, but rather charged, psychological landscapes.
Crowds of people are a recurring feature, surging masses with their own specific tidal rhythms that seem often to dissolve into the architecture that should contain them. Faces and figures emerge from washes of color like visitors from a different time and place. Applied through silk screening, they were sourced from books and historical archives including the renowned collections of the Warburg Institute in London: a fragment of a medieval woodcut from a mid-15th century copy of the Book of Revelation; a statue of the goddess Aphrodite uncovered in Pompeii; a mask of a fox used in a French avant-garde theatre production of André Obey’s Noé, and so on. Bobbing up within the paintings like bits of collaged flotsam and jetsam, they float among motifs and subjects borrowed from the artist's own photographs and drawings in a layering of abstraction and figuration, of techniques and time registers, something that Aby Warburg himself referred to as ‘a subconscious memory of civilization’.
In these new works Goss expands his visual language, pushing further into spatial ambiguity and vertiginous perspective, and using dye-like stains and silkscreen overlays to evoke both erosion and trace. He continues his ongoing interest in cultural sediment and the personal memories held within public space, and in doing so offers a profound meditation on how we remember, why we gather and what it means to feel, at once, connected and alone. Much like the city that he is depicting, whose famous sea wall is trapped in a perpetual cycle of rebuilding and crumbling, the paintings are themselves between states, in transit, hovering somewhere between solidity and disappearance.
—Jasper Sharp
Nick Goss (b. 1981, Bristol, UK) lives and works in London. He received his MA in Fine Art from Royal Academy Schools in 2009 and BA in Fine Art from Slade School of Fine Art in 2006.
Solo exhibitions of Goss’s work include Isle of Thanet, Perrotin, Paris, FR (2024); Smickle Inn, Balcony of Europe, Ingleby, Edinburgh, UK (2023); The Undercurrents, Matthew Brown, Los Angeles (2022); Mud Angels, Thelma Hulbert Gallery, Honiton, UK (2022); Margaritas at The Mall, Contemporary Fine Arts, Berlin (2021); Nine Mile Burn, Josh Lilley, London (2020); Morley’s Mirror, Pallant House Gallery, London (2019); Dolphin Express, Contemporary Fine Arts, Berlin (2018); De Ramp, Josh Lilley, London (2017); Bluing, Simon Preston Gallery, New York (2016); Green Lanes, Josh Lilley, London (2015).
He has participated in group exhibitions including Wings of a Butterfly, Ingleby, Edinburgh, UK (2025); PROGRAM, Matthew Brown, New York (2024); Dead Can Dance, Contemporary Fine Arts, Basel (2024); Drawing Biennial 2024, Drawing Room, London (2024); IMAGINE YOU ARE DRIVING, Galleria Susanna Orlando, Pietrasanta, Italy (2023); Days Like These, de León Gallery, Bath, UK (2023); The Painted Room, curated by Caroline Walker, GRIMM, Amsterdam (2023); Summer Exhibition, Royal Academy of Arts, London (2023); Dear John, Adams and Ollman, Portland (2021); Hommage á Rainer Werner Fassbinder, Contemporary Fine Arts, Berlin (2020); Rainforest Action Network Exhibition, Eccleston Project Space, London (2019); Stains on a Decade, Josh Lilley, London (2019); Preparing for What, Josh Lilley, London (2019); Botánica, Berggruen Gallery, San Francisco (2017); Group Show 2017, Tannery Arts, London (2017); Currents , Lin & Lin Gallery, Taipei (2017); A New Kitchen Sink, Josh Lilley, London (2017); Rhythm & Depiction, Centre for Recent Drawing, London (2016); A Place of Our Time, Palazzo Capris, Turin (2016); Water Biscuit, Josh Lilley, London (2016); What are we gonna paint?, Annet Gelink Gallery, Amsterdam (2016); Bread and Jam IV: Modern Mirror, 52 Whitbread Road, London (2016); Tutti Frutti, Turps Gallery, London (2015).
Goss’s work is included in the collections of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; Victoria and Albert Museum, London; Dallas Museum of Art, Dallas; Cleveland Museum of Art, Cleveland, OH; Aishti Foundation, Beirut; Arts Council of England, London; Huamao Foundation, HK (Huamao Museum, Suzhou, China); Olivia Foundation, Mexico City; Pallant House Gallery, Chichester, UK; Zabludowicz Collection, London.