In her current exhibition, Hoberman explores more complex pictorial structures in large drawings and one 12-foot oil painting. The results are fantastical scenes of little girls and cats floating amid scattered foliage and tumbling over each other without regard for perspective or gravity.
NICKY HOBERMAN is well known for her paintings of large-faced figures placed against flat backgrounds in shallow spaces. Her subjects are always fixed in internally focused psychologies, separated from each other and us in their own isolated worlds. In her current exhibition, Hoberman explores more complex pictorial structures in large drawings and one 12-foot oil painting. The results are fantastical scenes of little girls and cats floating amid scattered foliage and tumbling over each other without regard for perspective or gravity. Each child’s knowing expression is riveting, yet the figures are clearly dissociated from each other no matter how closely they may be situated. Hoberman’s distorted, dream-like environments transform snapshot memories into not-so-innocent panoramas of a contemporary Alice in Wonderland reality.
Nicky Hoberman has exhibited internationally and are represented in numerous private and public collections.
Nicky Hoberman's expansive paintings of disengaged figures floating against flat colored backgrounds explore the themes of isolation, identity, and individuality for which she is well known. Her photo-realist detail and limited depth-of-field allude to the Polaroids from which she works. However, her composite images intentionally shift perspectives and postures to create idiosyncratic, almost dreamlike allegories. Prepubescent girls and adolescents knowingly look at the viewer so that one can not avoid their stare. At the same time, the subjects show a stronger inward than outward gaze, asking for attention while avoiding interaction. Exhibiting a range of attitudes from playful to serious, manifest to mysterious, and engaged to detached, these
hauntingly poignant portraits serve as reflections of our own psyche and emotional dislocation.
Born in South Africa, Nicky Hoberman graduated from the Chelsea College of Art and Design in London to become recognized as one of Britain's foremost figurative artists. Since 1996 she has exhibited in numerous galleries and museums worldwide and was featured in "The New Neurotic
Realism," published by the Saatchi Gallery.
Image:
Butterfly Kisses, 2003
oil on canvas
78 x 144 inches
Feigen Contemporary
535 West 20th Street, New York, NY 10011
Tel 212.929.0500 Fax 212.929.0065