With a new group of works on paper, David Nash expands his long-standing presence at Kloster Schönthal with a focused and at the same time intimate presentation in the Abbot’s Hall. While his sculptures have shaped the outdoor landscape for decades, the emphasis here shifts to the graphic and chromatic dimensions of his practice.

The works on view are created with pigments on paper and draw on key motifs from Nash’s sculptural language. Forms such as arcs, circles, and organic bodies appear as reduced, concise compositions that explore fundamental questions of rhythm, structure, and colour relationships. Rather than representing nature, they condense perception and experience.

“I realised that the physicality of sculpture can be transferred to working on paper – from thinking through the body and the hand to gestural traces on and within the paper.” David Nash, 2024

Rooted in a long-standing engagement with natural processes and seasonal change, the works develop from a recollection of colour and atmosphere. Applied in direct gestures, the pigments retain traces of their making and point to the tension between artistic intervention and natural dynamics.

The Abbot’s Hall thus becomes a distinct space of resonance in which Nash’s sculptural thinking continues in colour, gesture, and surface.

© David Nash / Heiner Grieder