Paul Noble:Nobspital

1997-98

Graphite on paper

98 x 59 inches

Made as part of Paul Noble’s monumental project ‘Nobson Newtown’, Nobspital, 1999, is a characteristically playful imagination of a bizarre, ultra-modern, and largely unusable hospital, a fixture in his imagined town of Nobson Newtown. As in other works, Noble acts as a pseudo-architect, producing a comically accurate and diagrammatic topography of this largely useless structure.

Unlike other works in the series, Nobspital refrains from explicit crudity as the artist focuses his attention on fashioning the building. In its design, the architecture recalls, in some ways, the nightmarish prints of Giovanni Piranesi, an artist fascinated with dense systems of structures containing stairs leading to nowhere, which he created in detail from imagination.

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In Context

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Carl Jung considered architecture to be a physical manifestation of the human psyche – he spent decades designing his home to represent his own mind. Paul Noble apparently draws on this idea, but instead creates a whole parodical, ideal city to represent his humour, his frustrations with modern living, his melancholy, and his hopes.

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Noble takes inspiration from architects and thinkers who have likewise designed imaginative, ideal, or useless buildings and cities. The artist draws from Claude-Nicolas Ledoux, an eighteenth-century French architect and town planner whose works are considered utopic. ‘Nobson Newtown’ also evokes the work of Tomasso Buzzi, an Italian twentieth-century thinker and architect, who created a folly ideal city that directly represents the surreal. Pictured here is his work La Scarzuola in Umbria, built over a thirty-year period. Much of this folly is, like Noble’s structures, meticulously designed, but useless.

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Despite his reputation as a maverick, Noble has received wide international acclaim. The many products of Nobson Newtown have been exhibited globally at renowned museums, such as the Museum of Modern Art, New York. Pictured above is Nobspital alongside ‘Mall’, 2001, at MoMA’s 2002 group exhibition ‘Drawing Now: Eight Propositions’.

B. United Kingdom1963

Biography

Taking inspiration from scrolls, artifacts, antiquities, and drafts from around the world, Paul Noble (b. 1963) has crafted a career-long drawing project, Nobson Newtown, exploring stories, images, and architectures of a fantastical city. Hovering between a wasteland and a utopia, Noble’s gesamtkunstwerk has been crafted between buildings, peoples, dreams, and typography to capture the melancholy of urbanity. A maverick amongst the British art scene, Noble has masterfully synergised a diaspora of references into a humanless city filled with human emotion and shortcomings.

Noble was born in Northumberland and attended Sunderland Polytechnic and Humberside College of Higher Education, graduating in 1986. Shortlisted for the Turner Prize in 2012, his monumental collection of drawings has brought Noble’s works to museums and galleries, including the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles in 2005, and Tate Britain in 2010.