Nick Knight: Roses from my Garden

Albion Barn is delighted to present an exhibition of still life photography by Nick Knight. Knight’s career, spanning four decades, has seen him firmly placed as an eminent figure across fashion, video, and image making. His series ‘Roses from my Garden’ continues the progressive vision Knight established within his commercial career, to develop a process that blends painting, photography, and AI processing.
Nick Knight,

Tuesday 23rd May, 2017, 2019,

Hand-coated pigment print

(KNI 012)

The language of these opulent and romantic artworks seems, from a distance, to be that of painting, led by the evident visual connections between Knight’s photography and 16^th and 17^th century Dutch flower painting. However, upon closer examination, the hybridity of the surface emerges, ranging from pixilation to digital brushstrokes to AI programmed whirls. The multi-layered process of production is implicit in the texture of the print. First picked and arranged in a pared back, naturally lit environment, Knight photographs the composition with an iPhone camera. After layering a series of Instagram filters, the relatively small, low-quality image is dramatically expanded and sent through an AI processor. This image is then refined, layered, painted upon, highlighted – the perfectionism of the process leading to the hyperreal, uncanny quality of the composition.

The restrained and decorative compositions speak to something that is held in motion: a sense of weightlessness or suspension of gravity. The roses seem to be upon the brink of decay, their softness and tenderness almost like a death bloom – a last expulsion of beauty and colour before they wither. At once whimsical and contemplative, the large-scale prints offer an environment of juxtapositions; abundance combined with fragility. This transient temporality appears to offer a naturalistic foil to vanitas or momento mori painting; the ephemeral nature of life is at the forefront of Knight’s still lives.
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Nick Knight OBE (b.1958) is a British fashion photographer who is also founder and director of SHOWstudio.com. He is an honorary professor at University of the Arts, London and was awarded an honorary Ph.D. by the same university. For the last forty years, Nick has shot award-winning images for commercial and editorial purposes. His groundbreaking creative collaborations with leading designers including Yohji Yamamoto, John Galliano, Gareth Pugh and Alexander McQueen, alongside his vanguard advertising campaigns for prestigious clients such as Dior, Lancôme, Tom Ford, Calvin Klein or Yves Saint Laurent have helped to make him a household name in both fine art and fashion. His stories in British Vogue, W magazine, Dazed & Confused, Another Magazine and i-D magazine have all pushed the industry past the classic parameters of fashion photography, while his award winning music videos for Bjork, Lady Gaga and Kanye West have firmly established Knight as an eminent Director and Image Maker. His first book of photographs Skinheads was published in 1982, winning a D&AD award in 1996. He then went on to publish Nicknight, a twelve-year retrospective of his work, and Flora, a series of inimitable still lives, both published by Schirmer/Mosel. His latest book, entitled Nick Knight, was published by HarperCollins in 2009. His work has been exhibited at such international art institutions as the Tate Modern, Victoria & Albert Museum, Saatchi Gallery, the Photographers' Gallery, Hayward Gallery, Serpentine Gallery, The Daelim Musuem, and the Gagosian Gallery.
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Nick Knight: Roses from my Garden

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