The title of this exhi­bi­tion derives from a call­ing card off­set print­ed by John in the 1990s, which states in plain Hel­veti­ca, black ink on white card: ​‘John Nixon: Artist of the Mono­chrome’. With this sim­ple yet pro­found descrip­tion of him­self, John affirms his strong sense of per­son­al iden­ti­fi­ca­tion with this most fun­da­men­tal of mod­ernist arche­types — the epit­o­me of non-objec­tive abstrac­tion. His life­long inves­ti­ga­tion of the mono­chrome, in all its stark sim­plic­i­ty and nuanced com­plex­i­ty, is a con­tin­u­ous and vital aspect of his mul­ti­fac­eted oeuvre.

Nixon’s very first paint­ings from 1968 — the works he con­sid­ered foun­da­tion­al to his prac­tice — were mono­chromes: black Dulux enam­el on can­vas, raw can­vas, and red or grey felt among oth­er pri­ma­ry exam­ples, scaled to just 9 × 9 × 4 cm. Their com­pact size and blocky shape gave rise to his term for them, Block Paint­ings. From that time onwards, John explored the mono­chrome at var­i­ous scales and through the wide vari­ety of quo­tid­i­an mate­ri­als char­ac­ter­is­tic of his oeu­vre, return­ing repeat­ed­ly to one-colour paint­ing as a gen­er­a­tive touch­stone or ​‘zero point’ for his wide-rang­ing and explorato­ry practice.

By strip­ping art of the dis­trac­tions of nar­ra­tive and fig­u­ra­tion, the mono­chrome became for him a means of con­cen­trat­ing on the essen­tial ques­tion of art itself — its very nature and pur­pose — as he artic­u­lates with both rigour and poet­ry in his 1993 text, repub­lished here, and through the diverse works on dis­play in this exhi­bi­tion.

(Text by Sue Cramer, 2025)