John Nixon
Small Black + White Pairs

John Nixon’s works are mostly made in groups or series. In recent years he has refined this relational principal and brought it to be the forefront of the viewers experience by producing paintings in pairs intended to be exhibited together and sometimes attached to each other. In this new exhibition Nixon hones this idea further by presenting a series of small paired paintings in predominantly black and white. When viewed in sequence, these paired paintings appear as variations on a theme. Yet they are by no means systematic. Nixon does not make use of any rigorous permutational structures: his mode of variation is free. Each work suggest the following one that will reverse, recast, or repeat it: the presentation of related works side-by-side generates dynamism and formal complexity beyond what the artist describes as ‘relatively simple and reduced individual pieces’.