Nick Jeffrey. Photo by ©Maxime Ballesteros for Sleek
Throwing paint around and listening to music in his studio, young British-born Nick Jeffrey is an artist who doesn’t like to keep things too rigid. But his omnifarious approach always leads back to painting, as he explains: “The borders between genres have always, and are increasingly, becoming more blurred… painting has that real immediate nature”. Currently working on the “loose and free” material of semi-transparent polyester, Jeffrey is making what he calls “ambient and open” paintings that appear mellow in their ethereal tranquillity; punctuated colour blocks with indistinct forms, such as those seen in his recent Hannah Barry exhibition, “Youth”.
A hands-on artist whose engagement with process and texture infatuates him more than the cerebral meanderings of many of his generation, he explains that he is now “drifting towards work with an immediacy which hasn’t been overworked and has a simplicity about it… as the old saying goes, less is more.”
Jeffrey originally moved to Berlin just under three years ago, then returned after completing an MA at the Royal College of Art in London. “Berlin seems to be one of the most transitional cities in Europe… it’s a bit like a chameleon, constantly shape-shifting”. Working from a studio in Prenzlauer Berg, his preoccupation with surface and texture makes the dilapidated Berlin-interior-wall effect the perfect surrounding to his practice.
Influenced by Lawrence Weiner’s spray paintings and bleach series in which the artist would go to the houses of collectors or galleries and institutions and pour bleach on the carpet, Jeffrey’s artistic style as well as his character are somewhat anarchic. His exhibitions are often accompanied by a performative element (for a show in Italy he filled the gallery with so much smoke that people thought it was on fire, and Stan from the band Hounds Of Hate played alongside his work at his degree show) which adds to the fresh air of irreverence he offers to a medium repeatedly described as dead by critics and artists.
Text by Susanna Davies-Crook