O.S.B (Of Spaces Between)
Roland Hicks

OSB 12 (On southern beaches), 2017 Gouache, pencil and coloured paper on gesso panel, 23x30cm

 P.V: 11 May 2017 (6 - 10pm)
12 May – 23 June 2017

Press Release

Mrs Rick’s Cupboard is pleased to invite you to our next exhibition, 'O.S.B. (Of Spaces Between)’ by Roland Hicks.

Roland Hicks recent practice involves making slow, labour intensive paintings, sculptures and trompe l’oeil reliefs that reconstruct or reimagine hastily painted offcuts and assemblages made from the cheap building material Oriented Strand Board. The work celebrates the everyday while carrying a number of art historical allusions from C17th Dutch trompe l’oeil, abstraction/minimalism to Arte Povera, Kurt Schwitters and so on.The heightened level of attention employed in recreating or restaging these events attempts a sublimation of the banal - James Joyce’s idea of epiphany residing in the ‘whatness’ of a thing - but the point at which the 'art' really begins and ends remains ambiguous.
They are post Duchampian artworks in that they can be seen as re-made ready-mades, where the role of the artist/creator is both challenged and endorsed. The work is self-questioning, acknowledging the validity of the original object or assemblage’s claim to be art, while simultaneously suggesting that only the transformation under his hand makes it so. Hicks suggests that really; 'I’m having my cake and eating it.' 

Hicks aims to strike an uneasy balance - where the dynamic of the work shifts back and forth between a primitive creative act and something more carefully considered, between art and non-art, abstraction and realism, authenticity and simulation, beauty and boredom, sincerity and absurdity - and in so doing to stumble sideways through the gaps into some form of truthfulness. 

‘And the difficulty is that sometimes it’s hard to tell the truth because you think that the truth is too personal, or too boring, to tell. Or both. And sometimes it’s hard to tell the truth because the truth is hard to see, because it exists in a misty grey non-space between two strongly charged falsehoods that sound true but aren’t.’ (Nicholson Baker ‘The Anthologist’)

Roland Hicks lives and works in London. He gained his BA Fine Art degree at Winchester School of Art and his MA in Fine Art at Slade School of Art. Selected exhibitions include; Desktop, ArtKapsule, Wimpole St London (2017), RA Summer Show, Royal Academy, London (2016), The Garden Of Forking Paths, Lewisham Arthouse, London (2016), Jerwood Drawing Prize, Jerwood Space, London (2015), The Gathering Things, Eleven, London (2013), The This and The That (with Justin Allen) Eleven, London (2010), John Moores 25, Walker Art Gallery, Liverpool (2008/9), Give Me Every Little Thing, Ffotogallery, Cardiff (2007), Roland Hicks, Oriel Davies Gallery, Newtown, Wales, (2007)

For press enquiries please email [email protected]

OSB 26 (Obtain some balance) 2017 Gouache, pencil, coloured paper, plywood, polymer clay