Tim Noble

Palo Gallery presents Happy Land, a solo exhibition of recent wall reliefs by British artist Tim Noble at the gallery’s flagship location at 30 Bond Street in New York City. This is the London-based artist’s first solo exhibition with the gallery. The exhibition features a series of 17 new jesmonite relief panels of varying size and a large-scale installation made from wooden shards covered in gold leaf.

Contorted bodies, bacterial cells, household objects, food, plants, and religious and medieval historical symbols mingle in scenes loaded with the language of Hieronymus Bosch, Bruegel, and the Surrealists. Noble marries his signature language with our spectacle of 21st-century internet media consumption. Contemporary social media displaying the widest range of humanity from joy, absurdity, lewdness to dysmorphia are all on display within Noble’s monochrome white panels. The total rendition of our 21st-century internet culture in this all out affront gives us an opportunity to step back and admire the churning absurdity and beauty of the soil we currently inhabit.

Noble explores the fundamental absurdity and depravity of humanity in the face of 21st-century culture in the context of our broader history. His choice of reliefs as a medium reflects on the oldest forms of art-making in caves and on temple walls in Ancient Assyria, Greece, and Egypt. Noble subverts these cultural references that we often depict as pure and idealized by showing the reality of extreme violence, depravity, comedy, and realistic humanity.

Tim Noble (b. 1966), is a British artist who established his reputation in the 90’s working with his former partner Sue Webster. They rose to prominence making abstract shadow sculptures assembled from household rubbish, scrap metal and taxidermy animals. By shining light onto these assemblages they transform into highly accurate shadow profiles of the artists. In Noble’s latest body of solo work, the technical virtuosic skill has been redirected to times past; back so far in fact, as to touch upon wall reliefs more commonly found in ancient Egypt, Assyria and other Middle Eastern cultures than in today’s modes of contemporary art. The artist has manifested these beings, in their rawest state, from the realm of frozen subjectivity that initially poured from the sluice of the mind’s eye, through his fingertips, manipulated in clay until they crystallized into reconcilable imagery. Initially, modeled on top of cheap boards of plywood in a version of 3D doodling, the panels took shape gradually over months. Eventually, they became filled with visions–the mistakes and doubt morphed into definitive human and animal-like explorations. As one piece filled, another took its place until the boards began to literally hemorrhage with detail.