Dorothy X Annie Frost Nicholson

All of your textures live inside of me
First gallery exhibition of public artist Annie Frost Nicholson to open at Dorothy, Liverpool.

Press Release
February 2024
Published with kind permission from Zetteler

All photos © Tara Darby

- Multidisciplinary artist renowned for using public art to tackle mental health
- New series of ‘deeply personal’ paintings and drawings explores the architecture of city living, the slipperiness of memory and lost loves
- Billboard and public art installations run concurrently with exhibition
- Exhibition runs from 19 February until 12 April 2024

Annie Frost Nicholson is a multidisciplinary artist known for boldly intervening in public spaces, showing how art can be a powerful tool to tackle difficult conversations. Her projects have seen her paint major community-focused murals, tour an ice-cream van across the UK to open up conversations about mental health, and repurpose icons of modular design to tackle Covid-grief.

Now, at Dorothy gallery in Liverpool, Annie will have her very first gallery exhibition, showcasing a new series of ‘deeply personal’ paintings and drawings that explore the architecture of city living, the slipperiness of memory and lost loves.

A deeply personal exhibition

All photos © Tara Darby

As an artist who worked primarily in public space, Annie found the shift to making physical objects an intensely challenging experience on a personal level. ‘It felt like a real excavation and a cleansing, to go within, rather than reach outwards, as I have done for so many years with the public art.’ Crucially, the works create a different kind of relationship with the audience, which she thinks of as a ‘gentle invitation into an interior world, without solutions.’

Across her varied paintings and drawings, details from everyday life feature against a dramatic backdrop of striking graphical forms. Her specific use of place and geography – store fronts, train platforms, doorways; glimpsed, recorded, half-remembered – act as portals to access the past, but altered, reimagined, and subject to her own fantasies of colour, light, texture. In this way, the paintings navigate questions of memory and imagination, suggesting that we can’t reinhabit the past truly as it was, but we can create something other in its honour.

“Working with painting, collage, 70's textures and polaroids from many years of travelling and moving through grief, the body of work looks at memory, and how we continue to find our lost loves (and selves) in living landscapes, in dreams, on walks, through conversations and subsequent discoveries. The pieces have been made over a long period of time and reflection with a lot of reading, watching, waiting and dreaming, plus thanks to my indelible influences, Sophie Calle, Jenny Holzer, and more recently WG Sebald. There is great trepidation in making this work and also great safety in the world it has created in developing the pieces. It’s an honouring of those who make us and an invitation to engage in your own experience of memory, time and the continuum, ‘the thin piece of silk’, between life and death.”
– Annie Frost Nicholson, artist

Public art interventions – dancing and billboards
Concurrent with the gallery exhibition, Annie is showcasing a series of art posters across the city on billboards by Build Hollywood. The posters take inspiration from 70s design references, reflecting her interest in the ways nostalgia and misremembering shapes our perception of experiences and places.

Riffing on visual elements from the physical works, QR codes also invites the public to learn more about Annie’s work and encourages them to step inside the exhibition, creating a link between her interest in public space and the gallery.

Notes to editors
For more information or high-res images, please contact Sabine Zetteler at sabine@zetteler.co.uk.

The exhibition runs from 19 February until 12 April 2024. Private view opens during the run of the show on 1 March.