Nicola Tyson

Nicola Tyson (born 1960, London) is a British artist whose paintings and drawings centre on the figure — specifically on a body that is distorted, elongated, compressed and reconfigured in ways that resist both idealism and caricature. Working primarily in oil on canvas and ink on paper, Tyson has developed a visual language in which anatomy is treated as a set of propositions rather than a set of facts: limbs extend beyond their natural range, torsos multiply or collapse, faces dissolve into gesture.

Tyson’s work engages with questions of gender, desire and representation — not through illustration or polemic but through the formal decisions of painting itself. The figures she produces are neither male nor female in any stable sense; they occupy a space of bodily possibility that is simultaneously comic, unsettling and strangely tender.

Based in New York, Tyson has exhibited with Sadie Coles HQ in London and Petzel Gallery in New York. Publications produced in connection with her practice — catalogues, artist books, and printed matter — extend the concerns of the paintings into the format of the page.

  • Package Holiday: New British Art in the Ophiuchus Collection, The Hydra Workshop, Hydra, 1997. Front cover: solid bright blue card with "PACKAGE HOLIDAY" in large black bold type lower left; 15 artist names in three rows of small white text below — Don Brown, Peter Doig, Tracey Emin, Angus Fairhurst, Damien Hirst, Gary Hume, Sarah Lucas, Paul Noble, Chris Ofili, Richard Patterson, Simon Patterson, Georgina Starr, Sam Taylor-Wood, Nicola Tyson, Gillian Wearing. Landscape format, 21 × 15 cm. Light handling cr Package Holiday, Hydra Workshop, 1997. Interior spread: left, full-bleed colour photograph of Hydra harbour and hillside town — whitewashed cubic buildings descending to the water, blue sky and sea; right, white page with "PACKAGE HOLIDAY" heading in bold blue type, two paragraphs of exhibition text, and black silhouette of three stacked suitcases lower centre.

    PACKAGE HOLIDAY: New British Art in the Ophiuchus Collection. Hydra Workshop, 1997

    PACKAGE HOLIDAY: New British Art in the Ophiuchus Collection. Hydra Workshop, 1997