Zygotes and Confessions: MOSTYN, Wales

 MOSTYN Open 21 ‘Audience Award’ winner Nick Hornby’s first UK solo exhibition comprises a new series of sculptures.

Hornby brings high-tech processes to figuration, pulling historical, material forms into the era of screen culture. His works defy conventional distinctions of form and media and  exhibit instead what Hornby terms ‘meta-cubism.’ In this pluralistic approach to perception neither image nor form takes centre stage. The sculptures are produced using digital and industrial processes, but retain the artist’s touch through their final process whereby a liquified image is applied to each work.

 

Gender and sexual identity are explored by the artist in this new series for the first time. Whilst Hornby’s work has previously resisted autobiographical connotations here he explores a sense of personal intimacy or ‘confessions.’ 

 

For all the connections between the form of his sculptures and their subject, Hornby’s work is also playfully evasive. This amplifies their fluidity while ideas of autobiography are complicated by collaboration. Nine of these new sculptures were made with the photographer Louie Banks, celebrated for his photographs  of  transgender models and drag queens. From a distance, the high gloss finish of the works  – morphing portrait busts and ‘mantelpiece dogs’ – have a compelling tactility. The flickering between and blurring of identities within Hornby’s sculptural works serves to bring another dimension to the genre of portraiture, shifting from sculpture to photography and back again, all the while seductive and elusive.

 

Curator: Alfredo Cramerotti, Director, MOSTYN