This exhibition showcases the sculptural and pictorial work of David Nash. It includes a number of stencilled pastels, a favourite technique of the artist, as well as burnt wood and bronze sculptures. This English artist, who has made Wales his home, has developed an artistic vocabulary of forms—triangles, circles, squares, cones, spheres and cubes—and pure, clear colour. In his works on paper, Nash “sculpts” outlines through a meticulously studied chiaroscuro, a painstaking shaping of shadow and light effects. In doing so, he creates blank and solid spaces faithfully rendering the proportions of the volumes depicted. For his sculptures, the artist carefully selects the type of wood he will use, choosing only trees that are very old, if not already dead. He knows the distinctive characteristics of each species and works in a kind of communion with the material. His work also falls within a broader approach that is similar to Land Art.

Illustrated: Habitat, 2013, stencil pastel on paper; Yellow Stack, 2016, stencil pastel on paper; Very Black, 2011, burnt oak.

Biography

David Nash was born in 1945 in Esher, Surrey. Following his secondary school studies, he took courses at the Kingston School of Art, and then painting at the Brighton School of Art. He returned to the Kingston School of Art to study sculpture from 1965 to 1967. In 1967, he settled in Blaenau Ffestiniog, located in a remote corner of northern Wales that he had known well since childhood and not far from the slate quarries characterizing the landscape of the area. A member of the Royal Academy of Arts since 1999, his work is included in the collections of the major museums of Europe, North America, Australia and Japan.