Neil Gallʼs art is constantly moving and changing. The London artist transfers his ideas from one artistic medium to another. Neil Gall uses commonplace items such as plasticine, thread, cardboard, tape or rags to create fantastic objects and landscapes that, once photographed, become paintings, collages and drawings.

The transfer breathes life into the representatives of the world of non-living objects, lends them a new unity and essentiality. The artist takes advantage of the human propensity to discover faces and anthropomorphic forms in everything observed. In addition, his use of starkly modeled shadows and hard shadows results in a highly convincing spatial illusion. Most of all, however, Neil Gall achieves a synesthetic effect in a technically perfect rendition of the materialsʼ surface texture, which seems to transfer the modelʼs haptic experience into drawing or painting and thus intensifies the aesthetic effect of the chosen objects.

This reality-based or rather hyperreal execution stands in contrast to the seemingly absurd and fantastic mixture of objects and fragmented combination of multiple perspectives. The outcome is both desirably beautiful and eeriely repulsive. Mysterious hybrid creatures emerge from strange, surreal landscapes, which mimetically depict the banality of everyday life.

Neil Gall (*1967, Aberdeen) studied at the Slade School of Art in London. He lives and works in London. In 2007 the monograph Shelf Life was published and in 2008 followed the book Collage: Assembling Contemporary Art; both appeared with Black Dog Publishing.

(Images: Neil Gall, We Know What You've Seen, 2009, graphite on paper, 32.1 x 38 cm; More than Human, 2009 Oil on linen 66 x 56 cm; Courtesy of the artist and Aurel Scheibler)