John Nixon
EPW: Silver

Begun in 1995, John Nixon’s EPW: Silver developed over the following decade and a half as a sustained exploration of the monochrome, materiality and light. In Nixon’s words, ‘silver is opaque and reflective, a non-colour in the sense that we know colours to be’. Inspired by sunlight playing across silver-painted industrial rooftops, these paintings situate Nixon within an orbit of modernist experiment—Constructivism, Minimalism, the ZERO group and Fontana’s Spatialism. From tactile effects on rough hessian to smoother applications on MDF and canvas, their glimmering surfaces might evoke the infinity of the cosmos or the flash of sunlight on snow, while conveying above all the pure force of abstraction.

Sue Cramer, August 2026