Online Exhibition

Nick Goss: New Prints

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Nick Goss, Mud Angels, 2026 (detail)

Known for his atmospheric, layered approach to painting, Nick Goss explores environments rooted in factual documentary reality, while maintaining a liminality that resists resolution. In a group of new prints—his first etchings—the artist builds his own fiction around images of places discovered on his travels, such as the Eel Pie Island Hotel and Leopold Park in Ostend, Belgium. Goss’s prints will be on view in No Plan at All: Prints from BORCH Editions at David Zwirner London.

Nick Goss applying spit bite aquatint to an etching plate for Mud Angels at BORCH Editions.

Often the scenes depicted in my works evoke a type of silence or ambient sound, a drum set recently struck on the waterfront, the sound of a karaoke bar when the microphones are plugged in, the music is playing, but the protagonist has just left the scene.

—Nick Goss

Mud Angels takes its title from the civilian volunteers who rushed to provide aid in Florence after a catastrophic flood in 1966 left the city coated in thick mud and debris. The colloquially named gli angeli del fango, translated as “mud angels,” helped preserve Florence’s rich Renaissance history, saving artworks and iconic architectural sites from ruin. Goss reimagines the subject, referring to snapshots he captured at an In-N-Out Burger in Los Angeles—a disparate association that folds together ideas of labor and community separated by centuries.

Preparatory sketches for Mud Angels.

Archival photos of the lively Eel Pie Hotel Ballroom in the 1960s inspired Eel Pie Ballroom.

Eel Pie Ballroom and Eel Pie Island form part of a body of work centered on Eel Pie Island, a small, difficult to access in the middle of the River Thames in London’s Twickenham suburb.

In the 1960s, the hotel at Eel Pie Island was a hub for burgeoning musicians—a gathering place for wild nights of dancing, jazz, and performances from rock-and-roll legends including the Rolling Stones, The Who, and Pink Floyd. By the end of the decade, the deteriorating hotel was shuttered and Eel Pie became home to the United Kingdom’s largest hippie commune.

With Eel Pie Island, Goss creates a landscape based loosely on the island’s geography and built environment, dotting the scene with imagined interventions. The resulting image amounts to an essentially fictional island, the mythologies of Eel Pie resonating through time and history, as well as its ecology and architecture.

Nick Goss reviewing proofs of Eel Pie Ballroom and Eel Pie Island with printer Thomas Castenschiold Dehlholm, 2026.

This snapshot of the bustling Leopold Park in Ostend, Belgium inspired Nick Goss’s etching, Leopold Park, 2026.

The title and source imagery for Leopold Park comes from Leopold Park in Ostend, Belgium. Fascinated by the city’s rich artistic heritage—as it was a crucial site in the lives and work of both Léon Spilliaert and James Ensor—Goss visited Ostend in 2024, making quick sketches as he walked along the streets and beaches, and capturing snapshots to reference upon returning to his studio.

The large copper plate for Mud Angels, with the artist’s studies and reference images on the wall at BORCH Editions, 2026.

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