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Neil Gall at DOMOBAAL

Neil Gall
Arrange your face
01.10.15 – 07.11.15
Opens Thursday 1 October 6–8pm
Thursday – Saturday 12-6pm or by appointment

Domo Baal is delighted to present a solo exhibition of six new and recent paintings and one new large drawing by Neil Gall. To arrange your face: to hide in plain sight, to compose your features in an attempt to conceal motives, feelings, or beliefs. The age–old art of dissembling is one we all employ every day, for the purpose of sane conviviality if nothing else. Neil Gall describes himself – resolutely – as an abstract painter – and yet here, in 'Arrange your face' he offers a series of portraits. 'Looking at the Overlooked' – Gall begins a process of deconstruction prior to putting brush to canvas, building models in his studio with available and found used materials, the detritus of studio life. Gall's paintings might at first appear to belong to the contemporary 'trope' of collage, sampling and appropriation; destroy to rebuild etc., but for Gall, the process always begins with construction.

The subjects of his paintings are modelled in the studio out of assorted remnants – packaging, string, tape; their 'faces' collaged from casually appropriated scraps – discarded plastic flowers, crumpled pages ripped from magazines. The iconoclastic oddities are then photographed and it is from these photographic records
that Gall, as painter, works from. There is no trickery to Gall's work, as for example with Noble & Webster's transformations of detritus, where the illusion remains as a stable illusion. He does not present us with façades but rather with an intimate set of portraits, which revel in personification; their subjects inviting us to question not how they came to be, but who exactly they are.

Neil Gall's (born 1967, Aberdeen) solo exhibitions include 'Cut–Outs, Offcuts and Holes' at David Nolan Gallery in New York, earlier this year, and 'Neil Gall' at David Nolan Gallery in 2012 and 'Re–Make/Re–Model' at Aurel Scheibler, Berlin in 2009. Recent group shows include 'Embracing Modernism, Ten Years of drawings acquisitions' at The Morgan Library and Museum in New York. Collections that include works by Neil Gall include Aberdeen City Art Gallery, David Roberts Arts Foundation, Denver Art Museum, Hiscox, Insinger de Beaufort, Simmons & Simmons, The Lodeveans Collection, the Morgan Library and Museum, New York, the Zabludowicz Art Trust, and Unilever among others.

Monographs on Neil Gall's work were published in 2012 by Hatje Cantz with a text by Nicholas Cullinan, and in 2007 'Shelf Life, Neil Gall' with texts by Simon Groom, Charles Darwent and Dr Johanna Malt by Black Dog.

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