Nicky Hodge

Nicky Hodge creates her abstract paintings and drawings with immediacy and intuition, working quickly and performatively to make sweeping, gestural marks. Using acrylic diluted with water on raw, untreated canvas, she often softens the surface with a brush, blurring calligraphic gestures into ethereal forms. Her works on paper follow a similarly spontaneous rhythm. She is drawn to the energy that emerges from this gestural process — the sense of a line taking itself for a walk, as Paul Klee once described — and to the emotional resonance that such instinctive mark-making can evoke.

“I feel my paintings are vessels for conveying emotion,” she explains. “Not necessarily my own, but those of the viewer — some strong feeling that is not for me to decide. I never know what I’m going to create on a given day in terms of imagery, so the process is not only intuitive, but also risky and open to chance. I never revisit the same thing twice — my work is about exploration and making forays into the unknown.”

Hodge lives in Bristol and works from a studio just a short distance from her home. She studied Fine Art and Critical Studies at Central Saint Martins, and received her postgraduate diploma in Fine Art from Goldsmiths College in 2015. Since 2018, she has dedicated herself to her practice full-time. Her work has been shown in numerous exhibitions, including Horse Gossip, a solo exhibition at Bobinska Brownlee in 2021, and a two-person show with German abstract artist Michael Kaul at Hart’s Lane Gallery, London, in 2022. In 2023, she presented Slip Road, a solo exhibition at Francis Gallery, Bath. The following year, she participated in Terra, an exhibition spanning three sites in Burgundy, France. In 2025, her work was included in Bridges, a group show at Biscuit Gallery, Tokyo, as well as Cross Currents, an exhibition of abstract painters from New York and London at Helm Contemporary, New York.