Alex Hank: Several Flames | Richard Nagy Ltd
I have only seen this upstairs gallery open a total of twice in all the years I’ve been gallery going in Mayfair (slightly longer than the seven plus years the Artangled project has been going). But they were two good exhibitions - one on Egon Schiele in 2018, the other on Alfred Kubin’s drawings the previous year. When I used to visit Lévy Gorvy’s old space, on the same floor as this gallery, I used to peer in through the glass partitions in Richard Nagy’s front door. It was always dark inside.
So when I passed a sandwich board on Saturday, advertising a new exhibition, I was super excited to visit. The atmosphere was appropriately strange: I was let in by a gallerist who awkwardly hovered throughout my visit, shifting from foot to foot and making the floorboards creak. There was temporary-looking netting in the upper windows and bangs and crashes of building work outside. The light cast was warm and dim. An oddly liminal space.
818919209114 - G (2024)
The works on show were also a surprise. I’d thought Richard Nagy specialised in German and Austrian expressionist art, but Alex Hank is a contemporary Mexican artist, albeit once who lives in the German-speaking part of Switzerland.
Hank’s drawn several portraits, mainly of beautifully unavailable-looking young men, all of whom have their eyes averted. He’s drawn them on local birchwood, a medium that’s surprisingly delicate-looking up close, despite its robust hardness. His wavy pencil lines sometimes get caught in fluff from where the wood’s been shaved down: it’s all local to the artist’s studio, up in the Alps.
When finally I left, the door was slammed and locked immediately. It’s Richard Nagy’s first exhibition since March 2020. It closes next week, when the gallery goes dark again, for who knows how long.
Alex Hank: Several Flames is at Richard Nagy Ltd (London). 09 October - 01 November 2024