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Centre for Recent Drawing presents the work of brothers Nick and Phil Goss. Nick studied at the Slade and the Royal Academy Schools, London, whilst Phil has studied in both in Edinburgh and Barcelona. Despite studying at some distance to each other, both artists share similar fascinations using quite different drawing modes. Both employ found images and imagined spaces to present, if not a carnivalesque apocalypse, certainly an absurd burlesque. There is a continental European tradition active in the work. Both spent a great deal of their childhood in Holland, but they now work in studios in East London not far from each other. The drawings negotiate these two locations: one of memory, one of presence. Setting their work side by side allows us a greater insight into the drawing practice of both, and illuminates larger issues in drawing and representation.

Phil Goss uses pattern and carnivalesque characters, combining pencil drawing and collage. The narrative quality in his work (he studied English in Edinburgh and fine art in Barcelona) invites comparisons with Marcel Dzama, Jockum Nordstrom, Ensor and Goya.  Phil's drawings are often done on found pieces of paper, lending them a strong material quality, almost as relics from an alternate universe. His characters draw on a tradition of illustration (learnt by copying children’s illustrations during his childhood) where the characters are imbued with an inner life and presence, and yet the exact nature of their narrative eludes the viewer. The collage elements are from found sources, but the world transposed is obscured by their reduction to formal use; the collage intimates the chthonic presence of an alternate world, now restructured by the force of the mise-en-scene.

The work of Nick Goss addresses presence and memory. The title of his current exhibition at Josh Lilley Gallery, Veverka, tells us more: taken from the German author W.G Sebald’s novel, Austerlitz, a moth-eaten, stuffed squirrel (or ‘veverka’ in Czech) found in the window of a junk shop, preoccupies the central character, seeking meaning in the frozen pose of this decrepit taxidermy, a physical manifestation of a life now passed. These current works are inspired by faded fairgrounds of California - the thrift-stores, the junkyards filled with second-hand bricolage and lost histories, yet the rendering of these objects is elusive. These pencil and ink renderings recall the soft conjurings of the theatre-of-life in Tiepolo’s drawings; almost functioning as an exhortation for these objects-as-characters - to restore the life of the objects’ original lustre and material promise. Displacing as we do our desire and memory in objects, we turn to the artist conjuror/re-animator, but the image fades before our eyes.