Tom Jeffreys applauds Nigel Hall's subtle, sensitive and confidently curated new exhibition at the Royal Academy.
In an exhibition containing over 100 small figurative drawings, it's strange (but perhaps appropriate) that the main Weston Room at the Royal Academy, is dominated by a large-scale abstract sculpture. Nigel Hall's bronze four-part piece – entitled Large Copper Mirrored – acts not only as a kind of anchor and central focal point round which the visitor can move, but as one does so, it also begins to function, loupe-like, as a kind of prism or lens. The gentle bronze curves form a frame for one's view of the works beyond, but a frame that shifts and moves as one moves around it.
Like his work, Nigel talks eloquently about the rhythms and movement of landscape, particularly in the way that it moves with us, its vistas and lines of sight seeming sometimes to revolve around the viewer. And Hall is certainly a careful, continual viewer of landscapes. He's best known for geometric abstract sculptures (like the one in the centre of the gallery here), but as part of the Artist's Laboratory series (which aims to encourage a Royal Academician to exhibit work that diverges from their usual practice) he's exhibiting over 100 drawings and sketches of landscapes from across the world. Most of these drawings have never been shown in public before, in part, Nigel tells me, to “avoid overly literal interpretations of the abstract works”. Interestingly here, it is the abstract sculptural work that acts as, literally, a lens through which to view the landscapes.
And what landscapes they are. For me, the highlights by far are the 50 or so drawings in the large Weston Room, depicting various Swiss valleys and villages. The curation is simply beautiful – double banked for impact – and sensitively arranged to highlight the undulations, and flowing repetitive rhythms, of a series of drawings produced by an artist with an astonishing affinity with place. Over the decades that Hall has repeatedly returned to the Engadine and Fex valleys, his style has changed very little – maybe it's become a little more refined, with a focus more on the nuances of light and shade than the definitive delineations of form. But it's landscape – and man's dark little cluster of houses within it – that is to the fore, crisply, sparsely evoked in rapid eight-minute sketches that display both a visionary confidence and a tentative sort of reticent charm.
What's interesting is that whilst the style is relatively consistent over time, it alters radically according to place. The Mojave Desert outside LA – “thrilling in its emptiness and dreamlike quality” – is rapidly evoked in a series of bold, brash oil pastel images from the late 1960s, while a 1984 depiction of a Miyajima shrine is sparsely minimal and immediately redolent of Japanese characters. Over in Australia, Ayers Rock rises from the surrounding scrubland, gently caressed with orange pencil,
These works are all on display in the smaller Weston Room, alongside several glass-topped vitrines containing sketchbooks packed with a whole cornucopia of images. Here, the focus shifts from the symphonies of landscape down to bars and individual notes: fallen twigs embedded in snow; air bubbles (like flattened pebbles) under ice; logs felled and chopped; fallen branches; cactuses; lengths of looped rope; and even a manhole cover, part of a series, and drawn deliberately upside-down.
What these little momentary snippets make clear is the importance of taking time to look. And just as Hall himself, Eolian Harp-like, constantly filters the world around him through creative eyes, so there's a responsibility for the visitor to stop and stand and look, and move on and look again. The more you look here the more you see: the subtle repetitions, doublings that bring about meaning – sometimes off-kilter, sometimes in perfect harmony. From the nuanced shadows created by wall-mounted double-ellipse sculpture Of Thunder, to the way the arrangement of three plans for sculptures echoes that of three looping abstract drawings (whose careful colour decisions are rendered even more pronounced in this greyscale context), all here is carefully linked. Right down to the very form of the sketches themselves, and as Hall puts it, “the fortuitous central divide that makes each drawing a diptych and gives a structure to the landscape”.
The more you examine the work, the more it does, the more it says – like landscape itself in fact, as Hall makes us aware. And the curation is a triumph – subtle, sensitive, confident. It's an exhibition that washes over you, and leaves you to think – and see – anew. This is a quite beautiful show.
Read Tom's account of a visit to Nigel Hall's studio, August 2011.
Artists' Laboratory 03 - Nigel Hall is at the Royal Academy until 23rd October 2011.
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