Collection: Paul Noble

Paul Noble (born 1963, Northumberland) is a British artist best known for his monumental graphite drawings of Nobson Newtown — a fictional city of his own invention, rendered in obsessive detail over more than two decades. The project began in the early 1990s and expanded into an encyclopaedic urban landscape governed by its own logic of planning, dysfunction and entropy.

Nobson Newtown is drawn in a consistent isometric perspective, its buildings lettered in a typeface Noble designed himself. The city contains civic structures, wastelands, monuments and lavatories; it is simultaneously utopian in its completeness and dystopian in its implications. The drawings are large, slow and cumulative — each sheet the product of hundreds of hours of mark-making that refuses the gestural in favour of the systematic.

Noble has exhibited with Gagosian Gallery internationally. Publications connected to his practice — catalogues, artist books, and printed matter — offer a compressed encounter with a world that resists compression, preserving the logic of Nobson in the portable format of the page.