Tim Noble & Sue Webster

Blind Painting, a solo exhibition of automatic paintings by Tim Noble and Sue Webster, will be the artists’ first New York solo show since 2008. Known for their sculptural shadow portraits built from bones, detritus, and cast body parts, the artists engage codependent opposites like intimacy and alienation, sex and violence, and high and low culture.

Noble and Webster continue to explore cultural and psychological paradoxes through a new set of constraints in a new medium. For their “Blind Paintings,” the artists voluntarily blindfold themselves to make portraits of each other from memory, surfacing tensions between familiarity and strangeness, control and chaos. Like the Surrealist’s game of exquisite corpse, in which players collectively assemble a drawing by following absurd instructions, Noble and Webster welcome the effects of accident and the subconscious in their work. The series is comprised of large black and white paintings as well as smaller works on paper that the artists painted with their feet.

In the second series of “Feinschmecker” or “fine detail” paintings, the artists wipe and fling excess paint left over from the portraits onto blank canvases. A foil to the concentration and personal specificity of the blind-contour works, these unconstrained abstractions embody an act of doing without thinking, recalling Rorschach tests and stream of consciousness experimentation.

Tim Noble and Sue Webster, who have worked together for almost twenty years, continue to play with traditional understanding of portraiture, abstraction, and collaboration in this new body of work.

Tim Noble (b 1966, Stroud, England) was educated at Cheltenham Art College, Nottingham Trent University, and The Royal College of Art, London. Sue Webster (b 1967, Leicester, England) was educated at Leicester Polytechnic and Nottingham Trent University. Both artists were awarded Honorary Degrees of Doctor of Art at Nottingham Trent University in 2009. The artists have shown in countless solo and group exhibitions internationally. Major public works projects include the Electric Fountain at Rockefeller Center in 2008, and Toxic Schizophrenia permanently installed at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Denver. Their work is in the permanent collections of AISHTI Foundation, Beirut; Arken Museum of Modern Art, Copenhagen; Art Gallery of South Australia, Adelaide; Artis-François Pinault, France; Berengo Studio, Venice; The British Museum, London; Dakis Joannou Collection, Athens; Es Baluard Museum, Palma, Spain; The Goss-Michael Collection, Dallas; Honart Museum, Tehran, Iran; Museum of Contemporary Art, Denver; Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles; National Portrait Gallery, London; The Olbricht Collection, Berlin; Project Space 176—The Zabludowicz Collection, London; Saatchi Collection, London; Samsung Museum, Seoul, Korea; Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York.