Paul Hosking

Work

Paul Hosking, born in Plymouth in 1976, is a British mixed-media artist who was formally educated at the Plymouth College of Art and Design as well as London’s renowned Goldsmith College. Over the course of his career, reflective surfaces have become the primary medium of his work. As an advocate of brilliance, colour, and pattern, he works with these visual components whilst maintaining a firm grasp on how those viewing his work would perceive it from the perspective of their own surroundings. Put another way, Hosking’s dazzling works not only encompass the atmosphere of the viewers’ surroundings – but they actually energise their physical and mental presence.

Reflection and repetition are two central motifs in Hosking’s work. As the artist plans out an approach to a new work, meticulously combining manual and digital elements, both motifs are already influencing his creative process right from the beginning. In particular, Hosking likes to play with various repeating patterns which will define the content of the work. One of the most familiar patterns he works with is the chain-link fence. Hosking often incorporates this distinctive grid into the mirrored surfaces of his works, creating a “fenced-in” effect that can be perceived on multiple levels.

The work Horizon (Yellow) for example, consists of several rectangular mirrors that are coupled to each other horizontally. The individual mirror elements are brightly coloured, each one different. Stretching across the surface of the entire work is a fence pattern in a highly contrasting yellow. What do we see when we look into this work of art? At first we see ourselves immersed in a polychromatic environment in front of a yellow fence – or wait, are we behind bars? The people viewing this work, as well as the room itself, seem trapped inside the artwork; the boundaries between reality and art begin to melt away. Reinforcing the ambiguity of our own standpoint is the fact that at the top of the work, the fence pattern begins to open up. Because this work actually reflects our own presence in the room, we must ultimately decide whether we see ourselves as fenced in – or on the outside, free. Hosking’s art skillfully plays a key role in how we resolve this ambiguity.

In addition to working with the chain link fence pattern, Paul Hosking also frequently chooses camouflage as an element – the patterns may be those of an animal’s fur or camouflage. In these works, he plays dramatically with the dimensions of showing/not showing. Of course, like his other works, these also reflect fragments of one’s mirror image, one’s identity. Here, too, people viewing the works exist on two levels: in front of the work and also inside it. However, thanks to the repeating patterns of camouflage that permeate these works, small details of our mirrored self are obscured. The mimetic properties of Hosking’s works trigger a metamorphosis, and we oscillate between human beings and works of art.

It’s not only with two-dimensional mirrored surfaces that Hosking delves into such transformative processes. Of particular note are his works that present as hinged, movable walls: these challenge our perspective in an even more interactive way. Recently, he has also created three-dimensional, free-standing floor sculptures. Here, he not only uses his characteristic fence pattern, but works with actual human silhouettes. Facial outlines, aligned like templates in both positive and negative space, provide the mirrors from Hosking’s Rorschach Series with a conceptual frame. In the exhibition Door in the Wall, for the first time you will experience a more recent version of Hosking’s work from this series, namely a postmodern interpretation of the classic sculpted bust. With these sculptures, taking the form of three-dimensional facial silhouettes, the identity of the profiles becomes apparent only through the mirrored cross-section of the sculpture.

In all his works, Hosking translates the fleeting reflection into a tangible form. As a person’s mimesis is fixed, the work of art becomes an individual’s material memory. Paul Hosking’s mirror-based works can thus be read as identity-establishing media. We, our reflection, and our environment work together to define the images’ meaning. By inviting us to reflect on both physical and intellectual reality, they can arouse an array of emotions and memories.

Gwendolyn Faessler 2023

Door in the wall

In The Between

Look into Paul Hosking’s mirrors. By Tom Whyman

Is it really possible to be a solipsist? Even a philosopher like J.G. Fichte, bombastic post-Kantian Idealist, who attempted to ground all knowledge in the ‘I’, ultimately realised that his ‘I’ would be nothing, unless it was in contact with a substantial, external world; a world that, crucially, had other people in it. For Fichte, the ‘I’ is called to an awareness of itself by a ‘summons’; a summons which could only be issued by another ‘I’ – another free and rational being.

I am ‘I’. I am certain of my own thinking – the only thing, as Descartes famously asserted, that no- one could ever doubt. Cogito Ergo Sum. I know that I am conscious, that I am a point of experience that exists both within, and somehow behind and off to the side of, the external world. Everyone else, on the other hand, might be what contemporary philosophers of mind call a ‘cognitive zombie’: an empty thing, that just looks like a minded, conscious individual – going through the motions of what it is to be an ‘I’.

All philosophical skepticism is expressive of anxiety. An anxiety that maybe the world as I know it isn’t real; that maybe the people I find myself drawn to make connections to have nothing inside them, after all. That not only can I never know, I can never be known.

In their Dialectic of Enlightenment, Adorno and Horkheimer claim that all knowledge is grounded in the primal fear of the unknown. We have a drive to know things because in knowing them, in naming them, in being able to say what they are, we are able to figure out how to control them. Bruce Chatwin tells us something similar in The Songlines – that human intelligence evolved as a defence mechanism, a weapon in our early species’ foundational struggle against a large, cat-like predator, which hunted apes, before meeting its match in our brains and going extinct. The rest of human history has been spent fretting, trying to invent new threats, which might take that dead cat’s place.

Enlightenment, for Adorno and Horkheimer, was little more than a giant security racket. Promising to guard us against various threats, real or imagined, modern natural science and technology has churned the world up and made it even less safe: progress as marked from the sling to the atom bomb; the wholly Enlightened earth “radiant with triumphant disaster.” And of course, if you follow Chatwin, we like it that way.

We feel driven to know other people. This is at least in part from fear of not being known. A child of around a year old, might be happy playing by itself, but then immediately start crying when it sees its parent leave the room. In the look on its face, it discloses the truth of its fear: that with you gone, so might it too disappear.

With the Internet, and then with Smartphones, we invented magic: the means to always be potentially in contact with everyone in the world – anywhere, and all the time. The fear by rights should be dispelled: no parent, no friend, need ever leave us again. They are always in our pocket: we might talk to them whenever we like.

And yet the fear, instead, proliferates. On social media, we post: reach out to other people. But thanks to the algorithm, all we receive in reply is ourselves. As we post, as we communicate; as we reach out to others, so the self multiplies. It is as if we are standing in the way of ourselves, always blocking our own view.

In this work, Hosking plays with these ideas through the use of angled mirrors and inlaid paint, infinitely multiplying the viewer while simultaneously obscuring everything else. We become more and more ourselves, and know each other less and less.

If there is hope, it is in the fact that Descartes, after all, was wrong. In his Meditations, Descartes set out to place knowledge on foundations of apodictic certainty, trying to discover something which could not be doubted, to build everything else up from. Sat warming himself by his stove, disbelieving even the heat of its flames, and the chill in his bones, what Descartes discovered was his own intellectual activity of doubting – the “I think”. This much was probably fair enough. But then he leapt immediately, illegitimately, to something else: “therefore I am.”

Just because I think, does not mean I am. That I am thinking, only means that there is intellectual activity going on – it does not necessarily mean that this activity can be attributed to a single, discrete Being. This was Descartes’ error: to think that the self was something simple, transparent; self-contained.

Enlightenment has locked us inwards – but that does not mean we are transparent to ourselves. Self- knowledge is not easy, or obvious: our own first-personal experiences, of ourselves just as much of the world, do not only illuminate – they also obscure. Our own needs, our wants, our motivations – does anyone truly have a perfect handle on such things?

Consider the multiple versions of ourselves that Hosking’s work reflects back on us – together, do these individual adumbrations add up to any sort of comprehensible whole?

Sometimes I need my partner to tell me that I’m hungry, or overworked. Sometimes I need my son to tell me that what I really want, is to hide with him under the bed. On a social level, I literally need my family to sustain me in some of the most important facets of my identity: the things about myself I see, when I look in.

Solipsism isn’t possible – because we can only know ourselves through other people. Even if we are looking wholly inwards, we are sure to catch a glimpse of them too.

In The Between

Otherness

Nathalie Karg Gallery is pleased to present Otherness, an exhibition of new and recent work by the London-based British artist Paul Hosking. Otherness marks Hosking’s first solo presentation with the gallery and is accompanied by an essay, titled Finding oneself, by the conceptual artist and painter Sir Michael Craig-Martin.

Hosking works in a wide range of media involving a number of computerized techniques from industrial laser cutting, to CNC routing, to powder coating. These techniques are used alongside extremely intricate processes, all completed by hand, in which hundreds of individual parts are cut and inlaid together to form large picture planes composed of paint and mirror. The resulting artworks are investigations into the complex visual and psychological implications of mirrored surfaces, exploring the constant slippages between what is on the surface and what is beyond in the reflection.

Continuing this investigation, Otherness focuses on Hosking’s use of painted mirrors on aluminum. The use of colorful, ambient reflective surfaces seductively pulls the viewer in, playing into our innate desire to gaze upon our own reflection while we search the mirror for a sign of self-recognition, or perhaps an affirmation. As Michael Craig-Martin notes in his essay, Finding oneself, “Like Narcissus, we are compelled to look, a passing glance or a steady stare, for some reassuring or revealing sense of ourselves.” In Hosking’s recent work, the viewer’s gaze is halted by a chain link fence motif, marking “the exact border between us and the image beyond, allowing our eye to stop and focus on the otherwise elusive surface of the mirror.” According to Hosking these works are activated by the interaction between object and onlooker, as well as the environments in which they are hung and inhabit. The sense of “otherness”, says Hosking, is in the differences created between the real and perceived reality of the mirrored paintings.

The exhibition’s title has a secondary source of inspiration. Hosking notes that he was also inspired by the global Black Lives Matter movement and Brexit protests throughout the UK. The artist observed how the protest signs and posters altered the use and appearance of the fences they adorned; sometimes blocking or hiding them or creating a shrine to the gathering.With this in mind, the inclusion of the fence motif, which in several instances throughout the exhibition becomes intersected with colorful opaque rectangular placards, acts not only as a visual barrier between us and our reflection but also as a foreground that marks and divides the visual plane of the mirror. The hinged works and free-standing floor sculptures take this idea further as they create differences in the angle of the mirrors and adjust the viewer’s reflection accordingly. The viewer then finds themselves multiplied and repeated, in effect outnumbered, by their own reflection, troubling our sense of what is real and what is represented; between what is self and what is other.

Otherness

Fences

The inclusion of the image of chain-link fence seems to me to have been a breakthrough for Hosking. This delicate and fragile grid of fine lines is painted and perfectly cut to be inset into the coloured Plexiglas. As it is flush with the surface, it alone is not mirrored, but marks the exact border between us and the image beyond, allowing our eye to stop and focus on the otherwise elusive surface of the mirror.

Hosking’s use of colour adds an essential emotive and aesthetic dimension to these works, particularizing the ambience of each piece. The lighter the colour. the sharper the mirrored image, the darker, the more obscure the reflection. Mixing panels of different colours and intensities, and angling them in relation to each other, fractures the space, complicates our experience both physically and psychologically.

These beautiful, thought provoking works are exquisitely made, examples of contemporary craftsmanship using the materials and tools of today, Plexiglas, digital technology, laser cutting. To stand in front of one of them is not only to see oneself, but to find oneself someplace else apart, on the other side of the divide.

Sir Michael Craig-Martin

Fences

Protest

The very first time I entered Paul Hosking’s London studio, I was captivated and fascinated by the work of this British artist who studied art at Plymouth Art College and at the much-celebrated Goldsmiths College, London.

Hosking’s pieces are fresh and new. They are mesmerising, irritating, surprising – and quite impossible to capture, let alone reproduce in a catalogue.

The paintings on coloured acrylic mirrors interact with their surroundings. As the light changes in the diurnal rhythm, so does the intensity of their colours. Their glossy surfaces reflect the space around them and, of course, they reflect the spectator in front of them, prompting encounters with our own image. We are both spectators and performers in a complex play; we engage in a game of narcissistic pleasure; we hope that a work of art will reveal something about ourselves that was previously concealed.

But Hosking’s paintings not only reflect our own image. Their mirror surfaces are criss-crossed by opaque structures that evoke fencing mesh; these visual spaces simultaneously open up and close in on themselves. Both uncommonly inviting and drawing radical boundaries, these works encourage us to explore reality and fiction, what we can and cannot see.

Carina Andres Thalmann.

Protest

Skins

A mirror reflects an exact image of the space in front of it, albeit with minute and fascinating differences. In Lewis Carroll’s Through the Looking Glass, and What Alice Found There, the young protagonist cannot help herself wondering what she might find in Looking-Glass House: “I’m sure it’s got, oh! such beautiful things in it!” Although we may not wish to follow Alice’s example of slipping through to the other side of a mirror, most of us cannot resist throwing an interested glance at any mirror we come across. If this is true for ordinary mirrors, it is even truer for Paul Hosking’s extraordinary acrylic mirror works. Their coloured high-gloss surfaces alluringly reflect not just ourselves, but also the space around us, in perfect detail, in delicate hues, and with fascinating differences to our reality.

The British artist considers these high-gloss wall pieces, created in a marriage of mirrored glass with acrylic paint, to be paintings rather than mere mirrors. They enter into an immediate and complex dialogue with their surroundings, changing as the light shifts and shadows move. They contain not just the surrounding space but also the viewer. Marcel Duchamp’s famous observation about the “spectator [who] adds his contribution to the creative act” explicitly manifests itself in these works. That is why the viewer becomes a part of them as she gazes at and into them. In Hosking’s mirror world, we are all both performers and spectators, interrogators and respondents. Often, and particularly in private, we may look into a mirror in an act of contemplation and self-exploration. A similar situation occurs whenever we engage with a work of art – and our interest in such works always contains a glimmer of hope to discover something about ourselves, something that was previously concealed.

This process of reflection is given a particular hue – and a literal one at that – in Hosking’s work: the “mirrors” shimmer in gold, black and aquamarine blue; they gleam with a touch of luxury that appeals to our deep-rooted desire for anything new, intact and immaculate. Moreover, in the coloured mirror the reflected image appears more distant, and all the more desirable for it. A golden hue can create a promising appealing aura, even in the starkest exhibition gallery.

Alice Henkes

Skins

Camouflage

Works on Paper

Monochrome Camouflage

For us as human beings, mirrors exist primarily because they allow us to look at ourselves. Like Narcissus, we are compelled to look, a passing glance or a steady stare, for some reassuring or revealing sense of ourselves. Mirrors allow us to believe that we can see ourselves objectively, as others see us. The result is both intimate – what could be more so than a living image of oneself – but also distanced and detached.

Hosking exploits all these characteristics of mirrored surfaces in his work. It seems appropriate that the results should be seductively beautiful.

I am reminded of Duchamp’s observation that it is the viewer who completes a work of art, that the viewer ’s role is essential. Here that role is made overtly tangible. I also recall the scientific principal that, simply by the attempt to observe, researchers distort what they are observing.

Sir Michael Craig-Martin

Monochrome Camouflage

Wall Watcher

Wandering through a distracted maze of carefully selected and barely repressed references that have been melded into a complex social camouflage; or at least they would appear to be if it were possible to get a clear head and a clarified take on things. Pursuing the same image over and over again, shrinking reference and cropping it tight. Things small and flat and repeated in a literal cut and paste reference. Hotels and taxidermy. The slightly embarrassing realisation that you have just pissed on your shoes is not as bad as someone else pissing on them. Masks, Trophies, food. Black clad non-fashion, coffins and coloured sheets of mirror.

It is arguable that there are moments within the cultural discourse of the recent past that have managed to evade clear-cut reassessment. Arch styling, self-involvement, decoration and the precious object, it is not clear where Paul Hosking sits in relation to these suppressed discussions, but we can certain that his work is caught in a frame of apparently contradictory reference points that ensure that an ongoing frame of nostalgia is continually undermined by something more contemporary.

Liam Gilick

Wall Watcher

Rorschach Portrait

Hosking consequently established a body of work, which combines brilliant material aesthetics with perceptual patterns of psychology. His sculptures and wall objects present on first view fascinating independent forms and at the second view well-known schematics, for instance, the profiles of faces. Hosking develops his language of forms by the repetitive, varying fusion of Identically motives into one great shape. In that way he succeeds to place his works exactly at the cutting point of free form and unconscious recognition in perfect balance; you might call his work psychological formalism. Particularly he is fascinated by established principles of Perceptive Psychology. The term “Apophenia” deduced from the German term “Apophänie”, was introduced originally in the book “Die beginnende Schizophrenie. Versuch einer Gestaltanalyse des Wahns” of psychologist Klaus Conrad, which was Published in 1958. This term indicates a symptom from the initial stage of schizophrenia: the concerned persons start to see patters and messages in their daily environment, which are not visible for healthy probands. Paul Hosking forces similar effects in his work, but they are visible for everyone.

Stephan Koehler

Rorschach Portrait

PAUL HOSKING

Work