Across two paintings in acrylic on wood, Nick Fox’s Correspondence explores the complexity of intimate human relationships and the codes through which desire, longing and loss find expression. Drawing on queer histories, folklore, literature, mythology and subcultural symbolism, Fox considers the thresholds of intimacy and the ambiguities inherent in communicating emotional experience.

A twisted length of nylon twine lies discarded upon a verdant bed of grass. Suggestive of a fragment of script, this enigmatic form evokes both connection to something familiar and the possibility of rupture, hinting at a message whose meaning remains elusive. Informed by Fox’s studio archive of found objects, ephemera and images collected over the past twenty years, including photographs of rope, botanical imagery and nautical knots, the paintings transform familiar fragments into charged emblems of remembrance, connection and intimacy. These fragments acquire a talismanic quality, carrying traces of personal and symbolic narratives while suggesting meanings that extend beyond their material forms.

Fox’s use of symbolic language resonates particularly with queer histories, in which flowers, gestures and coded signs have offered ways to articulate desire beyond the reach of direct expression. Drawing on floriography and other forms of enigmatic imagery, Fox explores how such codes remain open to interpretation, their meanings shifting between revelation and concealment. Correspondence inhabits this uncertainty.

Nick Fox’s work explores the relationship between raw sentiment and its symbolic, visual and material articulation through painting, drawing, gilded cyanotype photograms, objects d’art and participatory projects. His practice gives form to ideas of transition, transformation and the uncertainty of communicating and connecting across the emotional spectrum.

In 2023, Fox performed/DJ’d Longing Disco, a live participatory project exploring the symbolic role of loss and music as a transformative tool for human relationships, at EMST, the National Museum of Contemporary Art, Athens.

Born in Durban, South Africa, in 1972, Nick Fox lives and works in London and Newcastle upon Tyne, where he lectures at Newcastle University. He studied at Liverpool John Moores University (1992–1995) and the Royal Academy Schools (1998–2001). Recent exhibitions include This Gloaming, Vane, Newcastle upon Tyne (2026); Gloam, Vivienne Roberts Projects (2025); and You Make Me Feel, FILET SPACE, London (2023). In 2015, BadSeed, a survey exhibition of over 100 works, was presented as part of Queer Season at Sutton House, National Trust. Fox received the Jerwood Contemporary Painters Award in 2007 and was a prize-winner in the John Moores Painting Prize in 2010. His two monographs are Phantasieblume (2010) and Nightsong (2013). His work is held in public and private collections, including the Walker Art Gallery, MOCA London and the Jean Pigozzi Collection.