Modern Art presents Ron Nagle’s third exhibition with the gallery, which takes place across two presentations: ‘Conniption’ at Helmet Row, and ‘Extraterrestrials’ at Bury Street. The exhibition includes new sculptures and a suite of new drawings.

Nagle’s presentation at Helmet Row, entitled ​‘Conniption’, conveys Nagle’s interest in colour and textural design in the built environment, especially in the transition from modernism to more contemporary paradigms. The works which come under the subheading ​‘Brutish’, are in part inspired in part by the Mexican architect Luis Barragán — whose work managed to harmonise the unlikely combination of Brutalist design with what he called ​“emotional architecture” — through the use of playful, contemporary colour and texture combined with traditional raw materials of wood and stone. Nagle’s sculptures, on their characteristically miniature scale, evoke something of the atmosphere of Barragán’s built environments. In these works, the hard-edge geometry of Brutalism is both built upon and toyed with by a light and mischievous use of texture, colour, and form, which offers a visual experience that is at once confounding and seductive.

At Modern Art’s Bury Street gallery, ​‘Extraterrestrials’ marks a departure for Nagle. If his works until now have evoked upright, architectural forms, these new sculptures are flattened out, their elements dispersed across a kind of pockmarked, lunar-like landscape, punctuated with oozing mounds and sinking orifices.