Ben Tolman & David Nash
Drawings

On view May 4 through June 15, 2019

Inspired by the complexities of urban geography, artist Ben Tolman executes highly detailed and time-consuming drawings of imagined city landscapes. Beginning with the real experience of a place Tolman builds levels of structures with Micron pens and a ruler, delving deeper and deeper into dark and humorous manufactured worlds. Storylines unfold and evolve at a microscopic level, revealing grave anecdotes of the impacts of capitalism, including poverty, isolation, and human struggle.

Ben Tolman was born in Wheaton, Maryland in 1979. He received his BFA from the Corcoran College of the Arts and Design, Washington, D.C. in 2005. In 2012, he received his MFA from American University. He has exhibited in solo and group shows in the US and internationally. Tolman continues to live and work in the Washington, D.C. area and is represented in the collections of the Philips Collection and Georgetown University.

David Nash is internationally renowned for large, dramatic sculptures and beautiful charcoal works on paper. Using every part of fallen trees, Nash creates monumental wood sculptures and charcoal drawings that explore the relation between humanity and our natural environment. His drawings are often done after a particular sculpture or group of sculptures. Sensuous and sometimes ethereal, they nevertheless retain a sense of the weight of the wood inspiring their form. This exhibition features three of those drawings. Black Dome relates directly to a sculpture created for his retrospective in 2010 at the Yorkshire Sculpture Park.

Born in Surrey in 1945, Nash has lived and worked in Blaenau Ffestiniog, North Wales since 1967. Nash attended the Kingston College of Art and the Chelsea School of Art. In 1999, he was elected a Royal Academician and was awarded an Order of the British Empire in 2004 for his dedicated service to the arts. gallery neptune & brown is delighted to present Nash and Tolman side by side. While working in distinct environments, both artists are deeply rooted in and responsive to their surroundings. Whether to political or environmental ends, in their work both artists react to cities’ limits.