Artworks

Nicolas Deshayes

Working primarily with various methods of industrial casting, Nicolas Deshayes’s sculptures tend to be hard, made from materials such as plastic, ceramic, vitreous enamel, aluminium or cast iron. Formally, however, his works reference soft, moving and malleable things; things that are alive and functioning. Recent sculptures have been made from glazed earthenware, fabricated using a slip-casting process in Veneto, Italy. Reminiscent of traditional domestic washbasins in their forms and colouring, they are also variably abstract and painterly, each with their own composition. Like vessels turned inside out, or bulging body parts, Deshayes’s ceramic sculptures play with positive and negative space.

Nicolas Deshayes (b. 1983, Nancy, France) lives and works in Dover, Kent. He graduated from the Royal College of Art with an MA in Sculpture (2009) after completing a BA in Sculpture at Chelsea College of Art and Design London (2005). His work has been included in exhibitions at E:Werk, Luckenwalde, Germany; Tate St Ives, Cornwall; Pump House Gallery, London; Modern Art, London; Glasgow Sculpture Studios, Glasgow; S1 Artspace, Sheffield; Ca’ Pesaro Museum of Modern Art, Venice; Museion Bolzano, Italy; Museum Fridericianum, Kassel; Inverlith House, Edinburgh; Leeds City Art Gallery, Leeds; Kestnergesselschaft, Hannover, FRAC Ile de France and FRAC Grand Large, France.