Join us for the Private View, 22 April, 6-8pm.

Josh Lilley is thrilled to present Eel Pie Hotel, British artist Nick Goss' (b. 1981, Bristol, England) sixth solo exhibition with the gallery. The exhibition positions the river as a site of memory, imagination and historical drift, where eleven new paintings and a series of works on paper will mark the artist's first solo show in London since 2020.

A text below by Emily LaBarge accompanies the exhibition.

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There are places and spaces that are real, but also not real, and this matters, but it also does not matter. What you see is what you see; and what you see is a kind of art history. Which is to say: geographical locations (urban, swampy, waterside, overgrown), like rooms (hallways, interiors, exteriors, tables and chairs, windows and views), are plucked from what we might call the real world, in order to make another world, old but new, and just as real — because imagination is, real, and what is life, but an extravagant, beguiling bricolage, in any case?

I have been to Eel Pie Island (have you?), though I have not eaten an eel pie, which were said to have been served, a local delicacy, at the Eel-Pie House that used to sit at the centre of the green and marshy island, roughly 9 acres, just down the curving Thames from Richmond, towards Twickenham, and beyond, Strawberry Hill, the candy-coloured Gothic Revival villa built by Horace Walpole in 1749. Did he — writer of spooky stories about the echoes of history, how the dead and the living, their images and fantasies overlap through time and space — frequent the island, dine on the savoury pies served up hot at the inn that existed from at least 1743, later replaced in 1830 by a grander building?

Three stories, it had rooms for guests, dining, and, later, a sprung ballroom floor (put some spring in your step) for classical dancing, then jazz, then wild times all round, by most accounts, when it hosted rock and R&B bands, including The Rolling Stones, The Yardbirds, The Who, Pink Floyd, Mott the Hoople, until it was basically trashed, too degraded and unsafe to use, at which point, in 1969, it was squatted by a group of local anarchists. A year later, the entire island (technically, the “ait” or “eyt,” the word for a small river island) was home to the biggest hippie commune in the UK. Declared derelict and to be demolished, the restaurant-turned-inn-turned-ballroom-turned-famed avant-garde music hall burned down, mysteriously, as did the notorious (and much-photographed) footbridge leading to it.

The island is still inhabited, to be sure — you can wander its winding paths and eccentric avenues, peek down narrow lanes to idiosyncratically designed houses, still with that vague hippie air. There’s a new footbridge, not as striking as the previous. And yet, the sense of the island of old hovers everywhere (maybe there’s something in the air), and once you start to think about what happened there, how many lives and stories came to pass, you can’t really stop.

Bodies moving through hallways, a crush of figures, their clothing flickering lapis, yellow, mauve, mustard. A hat here, a cape there, the walls painted watery blue, with fancy crystal ceiling lights overhead. Another crowd, under a bridge, maybe, watching a boxing match, maybe, an empty ring waiting, populated only by two unmanned microphone stands. A bridge, with throngs waiting to cross it, curving across a wide yellow void, like sunlit or sunset, or perhaps the light of memory, ethereal and bright. Unpeopled space, 1, 2, 3, 4, cafés or bars, before or after meals or revelry, a dish left untouched, a full martini glass waiting for its drinker to return.

In one, we catch a Matisse-like woman, drawn in spare lines, leaning on the table against one hand, tired; in another, a turtle and a wooden figure (inside), a cormorant, a sun, and five sickle slices of moon (outside); in another, an ancient landscape, a wonder of the world, outside the window like a mirage, like time travel, a picture book, an artist’s carefully chosen references collaged to make a whole. (Look carefully: benday dots, a film still, a curlicue pattern that repeats in different directions — no surface is single, no surface is what it seems.) And what about the river, that blue artery sometimes azure or Prussian blue, other times brilliant or dusky gold, which might have carried people to and fro, for pies and more, for past and present? There is a boat, if you want to take it, or you can stay on the opposite shore, with me, looking through the trees and wondering what else Nick Goss might show us.