Southern Shade I

Nigel Hall is one of Britain‘s leading sculptors. His work explores contrasts – and their mutual interdependence. His dialectic exploration of difference results in paradoxical sculptural configurations that evoke „weightless mass“ and „dynamic stillness“. Continuing on his path toward ever greater formal reduction, he pursues forms of increasing simplification and purity, allowing his pieces to be informed by „stilling and distilling“.

In his sculptures and charcoal drawings, the artist focuses on the relationships between form and void, plane and projected space, movement and stasis, expansion and contraction, as well as light and shadow. He explores his motifs in series which are often derived from basic geometric forms such as the circle, the ellipse, or the cone. The title Chinese Whispers refers to the essential aspect of transforming an idea as in the children’s game where a whispered message is subtly changed down the line. It could also refer to the incremental changes that occur to works over a period of time which result in major shifts.

Hall studied and tutored at the Royal College of Art, London. On the occasion of his 2008 retrospective at the Yorkshire Sculpture Park in Wakefield, the Royal Academy of Arts published a handsome monograph by Andrew Lambirth, Nigel Hall: Sculpture and Works on Paper. Hall is included in numerous public collections, among them the Museum of Modern Art in New York, Tate Gallery in London, the Nationalgalerie in Berlin, the Australian National Gallery in Canberra and the Kunsthaus Zurich.