Bartha Contemporary is delighted to present Nick Terry at von Bartha Collection in Basel, Switzerland.

In an age where we are inundated with imagery, focusing on minute details is a luxury we rarely indulge in at present. Nick Terry’s watercolours invite us to do just that. These small-scale works demand a visual space far more significant than their size would imply; their highly textured appearance and intricate compositions feel surprisingly unidentifiable yet familiar.

Large rolls of vinyl-saturated papers and application tapes are substrates for Terry’s paintings. These thin, crepe-like papers induce the water-based paints, solutions he makes himself, to amalgamate into creeks, pools, and crevices. The various textures are enhanced by the choice to only employ black and white paints to create them. Terry often edits the scale and dimension of the original surface area he sets to work on, isolating and developing areas of interest, working free from the confines of a predetermined size and composition.

Unidentifiable compositions and familiarity also lie at the heart of a recent film, Neuro Osmosis, a project Nick Terry and filmmaker David Fenster collaborated on over the past two years, screening during the exhibition and via barthacontemporary.com. As the film unfolds we see the evolution of Terry’s discoveries and painting practices, and along with him can marvel with how they relate to his father’s electron microscopy imagery, produced during his career as a pioneering neuropathologist.

The film reveals uncanny similarities between Terry’s recent paintings and his father’s research. As we explore the notion of osmosis, we are left wondering if the two simply shared an interest in similar visual occurrences or there are larger forces at play. Neuro Osmosis doesn’t answer whether the visual information absorbed at one stage in the artist’s life would come to inform the work made at another, yet the implied connections offer a metaphor for our own experiences.

As we experience the paintings in this exhibition we revel in the limitless possibilities his processes offer. Each painting provides a universe of visual information as unique as our brains and the perception they bestow us.