Nigel Hall RA: Line, Edge, Shadow: drawings and sculpture

Wed 9 October 2024 - Wed 18 December 2024

The Robert Cripps Gallery, Magdalene College

Nigel was born in Bristol and raised in the Gloucestershire countryside, studied at the West of England College of Art and the Royal College of Art. A Harkness Fellowship took him to California in 1967 for two years. From 1971 to 1981, he lectured at the Royal College of Art and Chelsea College of Art and Design. His awards include the Pollock-Krasner Award (1995), the Jack Goldhill Sculpture Prize (2002), and he was elected a Royal Academician (2003) and awarded an Honorary Doctorate from the University of the Arts, London (2017). Nigel has exhibited extensively, with his first European solo show in 1967 and over 100 solo and 300 group exhibitions globally.
On his upcoming Magdalene show, he says:

I was delighted to be offered an exhibition at the beautiful Robert Cripps Gallery at Magdalene College, Cambridge as it seems the perfect venue for an exhibition of my drawings and small sculptures. It has a long vista for experiencing larger works on paper and an intimacy conducive to exploring smaller pieces.

As well as drawings, there are three fine vitrines which will display small scale sculptures, both maquettes as well as finished works and also notebooks.

I find there is a symbiotic relationship between two and three dimensional works in which neither take precedence over the other. Drawing has played a constant and vital part in my work and not solely as preliminary studies for sculpture. It has allowed for related explorations freed from the tyranny of gravity to which sculpture is inextricably chained.

Certain views, trees and objects might draw me to them and then I reciprocate by drawing them in return. Drawing for me can be seeing, thinking, exploring, connecting and distilling. You need to know something about the subject in order to draw it and once drawn, it’s never forgotten.
The non-referential or ‘finished’ drawings shown in the Gallery, are complete works with the same status as my sculpture and mostly use the language of geometry as their mode of expression. In these works the subject is the form and the form is the subject.

Cost: Free