Scroll is pleased to present Anywhere Fast, a solo presentation of new works by Nick Hobbs. This is the artist's first exhibition with the gallery.
Hobbs renders his subjects in graphite across heavy watercolor paper with a restrained, grisaille palette and a steady hand. Each drawing is the result of a prolonged process: images are sourced from digital archives, personal photographs, and found imagery, then slowly constructed through thin, successive layers. Influenced by a lifetime of looking through telescopes as an amateur astronomer, Hobbs' compositions emulate the phenomenal qualities of those experiences. In the telescope's eyepiece, every rarified photon of light, like the delicate stroke of a pencil, is significant to the faint image that emerges on the velvety surface of the night sky. Scale bends within the eyepiece, providing the surreal sensation of intimacy with distant objects of unimaginable size. With one eye on the distant cosmos and the other on the back of a strained eyelid, weaving the mysterious and familiar together becomes second nature at the telescope. These same operations are at play in the visual universe created by the drawings - familiar forms drift into abstraction, while ambiguous images acquire unexpected emotional weight.
Working primarily at night, Hobbs brings that same quiet concentration into the studio. Densely layering strokes of pencil, Hobbs creates a velvety surface punctuated from some viewing angles by the metallic sheen distinct to graphite and rich in tonal depth and atmosphere. The process is slow, as Hobbs builds the surface in glaze-like layers, periodically wiping the entire picture out with a paper towel. The blurred after-image that results from this process provides fertile ground for discovery, forcing Hobbs to continuously redefine the picture. As the drawing approaches completion, the tooth of the paper is worn down, pushing Hobbs to land the picture before the materials force him to stop working. The hazy graphite surfaces, evoking not just visual space but a kind of perceptual slowness, hover between clarity and obscurity, the documented and the dreamt. Across different drawings, Hobbs connects dramatic juxtapositions of scale and subject, giving uncanny pairings the same material treatment and folding them into a shared visual universe.
Nick Hobbs (b. 1997, Shreveport, Louisiana) lives and works in Brooklyn, New York. He received his MFA from the University of Arkansas in 2023 and attended the Undergraduate Residency Program at the New York Academy of Art in 2018. Hobbs has presented solo exhibitions at Storage Gallery, New York and Turley Gallery, Hudson, and has exhibited with Kasmin Gallery, New York; My Pet Ram, New York; Huxley-Parlour, London; Main Projects, Richmond; Moosey, Norwich; and Weatherproof, Chicago. His work has been featured in ArtMaze Magazine, The Coastal Post, Friend of the Artist, and Booooooom.
