Paul Hosking- Archive

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

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

Sir Michael Craig-Martin

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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

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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

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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.

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

Carina Andres Thalmann.

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Archive

Works on Paper

Monochrome Camouflage

Skins

Camouflage

Rorschach Portrait

Protest