Nicholas May

Nicholas May’s canvases simultaneously interrogate and insist upon the possibilities of paint and painting. These paintings oscillate between contrasting states – beauty and decay, control and chance, drama and parody, form and formlessness.

The canvas, stained with a coloured ground, is a screen on which the paint enacts its own forms. These works draw upon the heroic era of abstract painting in the 1950s but they renounce its heroic legacy. Instead of asserting the author’s individuality and freedom, May’s paintings appear to have produced themselves.

Pigment, varnish and metal dust, bitumen and resin are mixed and poured – they coagulate and condense. Their movement is encouraged and arrested by the canvas being tipped or blown upon. The complete work is a freeze-frame of form.

In these paintings, as May has written of Sigmar Polke’s work – “the question of process is beautifully protected, alchemy denies the specificity of its process.” The artist and the paint are complicit partners in the formation of these works, which propose a questioning quietude.

Nicholas May was born in Limavady, N. Ireland in 1962. He attended the Bath Academy of Arts and received a Master of Arts from Goldsmiths College (1988 – 1990). His work has been represented in the I.C.A. New Contemporaries Exhibition¬ (1989/90), the Chisenhale Countdown Exhibition (a selection of six Goldsmith’s M.A graduates, 1990), and the Barclay’s Young Artist Award, Serpentine Gallery, 1991. In 1990, May had two solo exhibitions – at U7 Contemporary Art, London and at the John Hansard Gallery, Southampton. This exhibition, at the Frith Street Gallery, will be Nicholas May’s first one-person show in a commercial London Gallery.