(selected by Anthony Shapland)
CJ/32, 2004
Neal Rock paints with pigmented silicon, piped onto deep three-dimensional supports using icing bags. The densely layered, glistening constructions of paint are baroque in their decorative excess. Their visceral surfaces occasionally enclose synthetic flowers or other appropriated objects of commercial decoration; the silicon itself spreads across and away from its support like an organic form. Rock orchestrates our responses to the work between fascination and gentle revulsion.
For his exhibition at f a projects, his first solo exhibition in London, Rock worked with the full height and architectural complexity of the f a projects space to install a new series of works entitled 'Work from the Polari Range'. They draw their title from the covert language used in Londons 'homosexual underworld' as it was then prejudicially termed in the 1950s. This indicates the terrain of the work within a field of shifting meanings, both linguistic and visual. The works at times seem to grow out of the buildings very structure, a kind of ebullient decay, at other times they stand alone as pure sculptural compositions in paint.
Since graduating from St Martins in 2000, Rock has developed a unique and personal language and technique; his concerns are painterly in as much as his work develops an intense relation between surface and material, and abstract in so far as there is no distinction between the works form and what it represents. His work explores the limits of painting as practice, the boundaries between painting, sculpture and construction.
Since 2000 Rock has had solo shows with 'Work from the Polari Range' at fa projects London and Henry Urbach Architecture, New York & Kontainer, Los Angeles. His work has also appeared in international group shows such as 'Expander' Royal Academy of Arts London, 'Landsacape Confection' Wexner Center Columbus Ohio and 'Extreme Abstraction' Albright Knox Buffalo. He has forthcoming solo shows with Torch Amsterdam & Grand Arts Kansas City.
Rock is currently showing in The Nature of Things: An exploration of Beauty, Utopia & Decadence, at the Waterfall Gallery of Modern Art, Birmingham, curated by Henry Rodgers and Yvonne Hindle of the Fine Art Department of UCE (21 May - 25 September 2005). Artists include Glenn Brown, Thomas Florscheutz and Chris Jones.
Rock (b. 1976, Port Talbot, South Wales) lives and works in London.
f a projects, London >www.faprojects.com
Henry Urbach Architecture, New York >www.huagallery.com
Kontainer Gallery, Los Angeles >www.kontainergallery.com
Further information
Martin Holman, ‘A note about Neal Rock’ 'The tentacles are really rather beautiful and ancient-looking, like something you see on a fresco at the V&A my monster is looking a bit more tame I lay it out on an oval plate, each... read on
