Page contents
Areas of Focus
Artists
Edited: June 26, 2023
Nick Hornby
Pronouns
He/him
Date and place of birth
b. 1980
Current location
London, UK
Year(s) of residency and/or fellowship
2011, Project Resident

Nick Hornby is a British artist living and working in London, England. His work addresses queer identity, historical critique, semiotics and digital technology. He is known for his monumental site-specific works, that combine digital software with traditional materials such as bronze, steel, granite and marble.

Hornby studied at Slade School of Art and Chelsea College of Art where he was awarded the UAL Sculpture Prize. In the UK, he has exhibited at Tate Britain, The Southbank Centre, Leighton House London, CASS Sculpture Foundation and the Fitzwilliam Museum Cambridge. And internationally at The Museum of Arts and Design New York and Poznan Bienalle, Poland. Residencies include with Outset (Israel), Eyebeam (New York), and awards include the UAL Sculpture Prize. In 2014 he was made a Fellow of the Royal Society of Sculptors. His work has been reviewed in the New York Times, Frieze, Artforum, The Art Newspaper, The FT, and featured in Architectural Digest, Cultured Magazine and Artsy among others.

Boolean Architecture (2011)

What happens when you mix things together? Do you make brown? Or do you make explosions, or riots, or Chords and triads, Pop-art, or postmodernism?

Architecture is built layer upon layer onto of itself: Vitruvius, Alberti, Paladio, Loos, Gropius, Koolhaas. Buildings are built and understood in the terms of a hybridised international language – points, rounds, mechanical and organic, horizontal and vertical.

In this 6 month residency at Eyebeam, Nick researched the possibility of Architectural design by means of the Boolean operation – making new designs by the overlap of other existing buildings. Nick is a UK-based sculptor who makes multi-faceted works by overlapping references and carving out their commonality. Here at Eyebeam, he has stretched his investigation into the realm of Architecture with references ranging from the elevation of the White House, to the cross-section of the Guggenheim, …Falling Water, the Villa Savoye, and McDonalds Golden Arches; nothing sacred or out of bounds. The result is a contradiction: an irreverence to context and emphasis on form is at odds with the frame of deconstruction.

Meaning is at the heart of this enquiry. Yet out of this comes some fantastical mega-stuctures, fragments and failures and some functional designs that are intended to be realised as public artworks / usable pavilions… to exist in the public realm… to be sat in, touched, used, as shelter, as folly, as enquiry and provocation, in an urban setting or in a landscape.

Eyebeam models a new approach to artist-led creation for the public good; we are a non-profit that provides significant professional support and money to exceptional artists for the realization of important ideas that wouldn’t exist otherwise. Nobody else is doing this.

Support Our Work