David Hiroshi Jager on Nick Hobbs
The New York Sun
October 2024
Storage APT is a boutique art space adjunct to the main gallery tucked onto the Bowery. It is the ideal venue for Mr. Hobbs’s intimate, photorealistic drawings, small miracles of graphite legerdemain that evoke black and white photography as much as they do cinema.
In other words, Mr. Hobbs is either cosmically removed or intensely close. There is a glowing study of a Tiffany stained-glass lamp, a facial closeup of a distinctly uncomfortable man, a scarred Greenland shark in frigid arctic waters, orbital shots of the moon, and vast fields of stars. All are rendered in grayscale photo realism that mimics camera snapshots from the 1950s. Some have distinctly whimsical subject matter, such as the legs and feet of a woman walking a whippet through a city. Another of a skyscraper in forced, nearly Bauhaus, perspective from below, by contrast, is practically formalist. They are disorienting in perspective, style, and approach, even with their apparently uniform patina of technical perfection.