Nick Goss discovers new depths in etching’s layered possibilities
The painter's inaugural venture into printmaking emerges through a series of etchings that transform journeys to found places into contemplative fictional landscapes.
AI-assisted voice playback. Starts only when you choose Play.
There exists a particular alchemy when a painter ventures into territory long admired from a distance. For Nick Goss, whose practice has long embraced the marriage of painting and print through screenprinted gestures layered directly onto canvas, the move into etching represents something altogether different: a methodical, plate based exploration that unfolds across successive iterations and accumulated mark making.
The artist’s new etchings arrive as his first sustained engagement with the medium, yet the vocabulary feels entirely his own. Goss begins with fragments gathered during his travels, small architectural moments and overlooked places that possess their own quiet narrative weight. The Eel Pie Island Hotel in London, Leopold Park in Ostend, locations whose factual existence becomes merely the starting point for something more personal, more constructed. Through the language of etching, with its various techniques and the deliberate building of image across multiple plates, Goss constructs his own fictional geography, a parallel world that honours the original while transforming it into something altogether more intimate.
The process itself becomes the subject matter here. Where painting demands immediate gesture, etching requires patience, intention, the precise accumulation of line and tone across distinct stages. Each plate holds its own conversation, its own moment of decision. The artist engages with the additive nature of the medium as a form of thinking on the page, building meaning layer by layer, much as his screenprints do, yet with the particular poetry that only etching can offer.
This body of work, published by Utopia Editions, speaks to something deeper in Goss’s practice: the understanding that printmaking is not subsidiary to painting but rather a complementary language through which to explore similar concerns with greater deliberation. The atmospheric, layered sensibility that defines his studio practice translates here into the subtle gradations and accumulations possible within etching’s technical vocabulary.
The work will be presented as part of No Plan at All: Prints from BORCH Editions, an exhibition opening at David Zwirner’s London space on Thursday, November 5. Among the works on view will be one of Goss’s new etchings, offering glimpse into an artist at the threshold of newly discovered possibility.
Imagery courtesy of David Zwirner (@davidzwirner).
