Nick Evans: Abstract Machines
Exhibition at Tate St Ives, 2006-7

The fourth Tate St Ives Artist in Residence and the first sculptor, Nick Evans (b 1976), uses a diverse range of media, from cast and assembled resin, poured aluminium and hand-built ceramics. These intuitively constructed, composite objects of abstract and figurative elements have immediate visceral impact and bring bold design and colour to Tate St Ives.

Living and working in Glasgow, Evans is associated with the next generation of artists to come through the Glasgow School of Art. His latest work engages with current discussion on the formal potential of the art object, and its continued function as a mechanism of critical debate.

The vitality of Evans’ gestural forms is as much achieved through a joy of making as through an exploration of aspects of human experience. He constructs anarchic and playful relationships between his painted surfaces and animated forms, a testing ground in which to graft, overlap, manipulate, counterpoint and subvert extrapolated art historic samples or ‘specimens’: cubism, constructivism, art informel, abstract expressionism, graffiti art and pop, to name but a few. Drawing from a variety of sources from twentieth-century art history and contemporary culture, his eclectic practice subverts sculptural traditions whilst questioning contemporary social, political and cultural representations.