Neil Gall

Neil Gall grew up in Aberdeen, on the north-east coast of Scotland, in a working-class family. As a young boy he remembers spending hours watching his father drawing boats at the quayside between jobs. His father depicted the boats in great detail and constantly reworked these sketches to perfect the precise lines of his creations. As a student Gall developed a deep respect for the history of art – from the Renaissance to Cubism – and for British artists such as Paul Nash and artists with a ‘magical’ gift for drawing, like Jim Dine. The rigorous attitude that Gall brings to his works on paper began early in his career, as did his careful consideration of the subjects he portrayed and, accordingly, the scale of the sheet. Nevertheless, his technical virtuosity should not distract from his main goal: to enhance, confuse and make the viewer uncomfortable with his treatment of subjects. There is an anxiety that accompanies the ping-pong balls wrapped in black tape with glue gushing down the forms, and a playfulness to the use of found and disused cardboard or crumpled pages from magazines – all of which have a psychological and visual tension that intrigues the viewer.

Historically, the medium of drawing was frequently viewed as secondary to painting, until a seismic shift in Western art changed attitudes on what a drawing could be, prompting a new and independent life for the art form. One critical turning point was Bernice Rose’s groundbreaking exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art in 1976, Drawing Now, which subsequently toured Europe. Jasper Johns, Robert Morris, Claes Oldenburg, Cy Twombly,

Joseph Beuys and David Hockney led the charge, among others. Rose was in the right place at the right time and her exhibition resonated in Europe as well as America. From this moment on, MoMA’s Drawings Department had a strong influence on the art world in general and, not least, on both of the art dealers involved in this publication.

This book is devoted exclusively to Gall’s works on paper, allowing for a clear understanding of the singular importance of drawing for him since the mid-2000s. Not every artist takes drawing as seriously in the early stages of their career as, say, Edgar Degas, Georges Seurat, Carroll Dunham or Terry Winters, who used the medium to develop their ideas, and whose line was convincing and confident from the beginning, but Gall is one of those artists. He gives us substance with tension and power in drawings that are not studies but independent, finished works that stand alone.

Of the texts that accompany this book, one is by fellow traveller Alex Ross, the American artist whose working method is not unlike Gall’s, and whose fertile and poetic imagination is a perfect balance to the thoughtful and informative essay by curator and art historian Lexi Lee Sullivan. George Newall, who studied at the Courtauld Institute of Art before joining the commercial art world, has written insightful contributions to several sections of this book in close collaboration with the artist.

David Nolan and Aurel Scheibler

Refuse, Relic, Replica

Lexi Lee Sullivan

Neil Gall is an artist who balances the profound with the absurd in works that buzz with art historical reference. Over the course of his nearly 30-year practice, Gall has consistently explored matters of perception and mimesis through the visual language of household detritus. Working on paper and on canvas, he translates the visceral and psychological interactions between materials and their surfaces – corrugated cardboard and pressed tinfoil, ping-pong balls enshrouded in black pvc tape – to an unsettling and sometimes erotic effect. If painting was his first love and wedded partner, drawing is his lover. It has become increasingly important to his practice over the last 12 years, and taken up with a fierce dedication since 2016. The groups of recent drawings radiate with an intensity that demands our attention, and places a primacy on a reading of his drawn works to date.

The modern critic who belittles all representational concerns, because he sees them only as solved problems, underrates their power to inflame the artist’s mind and to intensify his vision and his touch.1

Leo Steinberg

Gall works representationally. He shapes, wraps, bundles, cuts, glues and fashions small-scale models from everyday materials like tape, coloured paper and garden wire that are then staged, photographed and either drawn or painted larger than life with a startling verisimilitude. Unlike Thomas Demand or Yamini Nayar, who destroy their sculptural constructions once their likeness has been captured, Gall keeps his models scattered around the studio, lying in wait for their next iteration. As such, his practice cannot be successfully charted as a progressive line, but is perhaps better visually understood as an everexpanding Venn diagram, continuously circling back and looping forward, overlapping and complicating the former with the latter. It is this sustained mining of subjects and ideas – the unsolved problems – in Gall’s drawn work that continues to push representation forward.

It seems fitting to begin with the recent N.O.G drawings (Studio), (Staring Back), (Moving Around) and (Artist Reflected) (all 2016 –17) that in many ways represent a new line of enquiry for Gall. In this work Gall has adopted the humble silver-foil card, purchased at a local craft shop, as his base modelling material. To create the model for these drawings, Gall used a scalpel knife to etch lines into its surface, sometimes cutting fully through the card in a circular shape, and in other areas incising just enough to lift the foil away from its substrate. Symbols have similarly been cut into the dimensional card, a two-way arrow as well as a stylised suture, with the letters J, O, P running across the top of the composition and N, O, G across the bottom. In this way he has created a series of irregularly angled mirrored surfaces that reflect their surroundings. As such, the resultant N.O.G drawings function as self-portraits, capturing the artist’s own reflection in their colourful prisms as well as a number of his paintings, seen in the glowing yellow and fleshy pink tones of Portal (2016). N.O.G ’s illusionistic references multiply when considered in relation to the master of allusion, and a specific inspiration for this work, Jasper Johns.

A stylistic chameleon, Johns has included shadowed gestures and sometimes even painted overtures to his admiration of nineteenth-century American trompe-l’oeil painters, John Frederick Peto and William Harnett, in his drawn and painted work. 2 In more introspective paintings like Ventriloquist (1983), Johns makes reference to Peto’s legacy and to paintings like The Cup We All Race 4 (c.1900), a photorealist depiction of a battered silver cup hanging by its handle on a green cabinet door with incised title, by painting a screen of suspended cups and vessels. 3 He also harkens more generally to ideas of visual perception in his depiction of the Rubin vase and by appropriating a signature trope of trompe-l’oeil painters.4 Like Peto’s drawing pins, or the nail in many trompe-l’oeil paintings, the tabs of tape function as a hyperrealistic device securing two-dimensional bits of paper. Symbols of illusionistic representation, the tape, pins and nails are visual dares to their viewers, to come closer and investigate the ‘real’.

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