We’ve all been so fixated (leaning toward paranoia!) here in the US on what we now know was a BLUE WAVE that we almost forgot one of our most highly anticipated art exhibitions in London, BUT, panic not, there are still days left to catch it at Rebecca Hoassack’s Gallery in the West End. The artist Richard Nott, who, with his husband Graham Fraser, was one half of Workers or Freedoms, a British fashion label that, in the 1980s, won Fashion Designer of the Year within four years of starting up.
Nott’s new Show is Where Have All the Flowers Gone?, and the series takes its title from Pete Seeger and Joe Hickerson’s 1961 folk anthem, a cyclical lament in which flowers are picked by young girls, the girls taken by young men, the men gone to soldiers, the soldiers to graveyards, and the graveyards covered once more in flowers. At its refrain, the song asks, with quiet devastation, When will they ever learn?, a plaintive question that feels remarkably relevant in a world once again marked by conflict and uncertainty.
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Working with a rich palette of softly marbled colors and intricate, layered patterns, Nott explores the flower as a motif that has traveled across cultures, histories and decorative traditions. In this way, the paintings suggest that beauty can be assembled from fragments and harmony found in difference.
Nott and Fraser have always been avid gardeners, and what we have always loved through the years is how, on so many levels, their approach to gardening has been similar to that for WFF, as they both have such a finely tuned, very natural sense of sheer creativity coming through flowera/colors that they love to design with
One of the most striking qualities of Nott’s work is its physicality. Paint is layered, scraped and marbled; metallic pigments catch the light and shift as the viewer moves. For Where Have All the Flowers Gone?, Nott worked primarily with palette knives, reserving brushes for only the smallest flowers. The palette knife, he admits, pushes him beyond his natural inclination towards neatness and precision, habits formed through years of a fashion designer’s exactitude. ‘There’s a funny kind of freedom in it,’ he says. The slow-drying nature of oil paint allows it to be reworked, smeared and pushed across the surface. The resulting works retain the precision and decorative intelligence that have long characterized his practice, but temper them with something freer and more instinctive.
| Where Have All the Flowers Gone? Richard Nott
8 October – 7 November 2026 |
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