Having trained in the classical tenets of still-life oil painting, Mulubinba/Newcastle-based painter Heath Nock now takes an iconoclast’s approach to the genre, expanding its field of vision to encompass found images from the cultural past and treating this eclectic source material as objects to be observed, dissected and remade with a still-life painter’s eye.
Nock applies the techniques of the Dutch masters to fragments of vintage advertising, old photographs and print ephemera – giving painterly weight to images once fleetingly consumed. “Using photos and advertising, cropping to create a new story with a sense of ambiguity,” he explains, “I want the viewer to question the work and be lost in the moment.”
Across his Painting Now series, these reframed relics become the “stuff of life” – playful, nostalgic and laced with irreverence. Nock’s intriguingly cropped, close-up compositions flirt with the language of mid-century magazines and 1970s leisure culture: suntanned bodies hog the frame, childhood snapshots are steeped in a halcyon glow, cigarette models offer a wink of louche, macho laconicism from a time when vice was aspirational. In the artist’s hands, this imagery is both homage and subtle critique – a witty meditation on how masculinity, desire and memory are staged and sold.
Following a landmark year that included a residency in Germany’s prestigious Young Artist Residency Weidingen and an acclaimed exhibition at UTS Gallery, Nock’s first showing with Michael Reid Sydney displays a thrilling expansion of his painterly vocabulary. What begins as an act of appropriation arrives as something more intimate and evocative – a portrait not of the figures he paints, but of the images themselves, newly luminous, transportive and alive.
For enquiries, please email dean@michaelreid.com.au
Explore more from Painting Now HERE.
