Paul Noble

Forging a unique and maverick path in the ebullient British art scene, Paul Noble received widespread international recognition for his vast and monumental drawing project Nobson Newtown. Drawing image after image, story after story—at once architect and town planner, archeologist and cartographer, social historian and activist, creator and destroyer—over the course of a decade Noble invented and described a melancholy urban vision somewhere between Claude-Nicolas Ledoux’s revolutionary utopias, SimCity, and the postapocalyptic wastelands pictured in the daily media. Nobson Newtown was Noble’s own fantasist master plan of a symbolic city, isometrically rendered and replete with all manner of nightmares, perversions, and scatological and libidinous excesses. A blocky, geometric font (also invented by the artist) structured many of the buildings themselves, providing yet another layer of meaning in this fascinating parody of contemporary society and the dreams of social engineers.

A meticulous and dedicated draftsman, Noble creates dizzyingly elaborate encrypted schemes, drawing from inspirations as diverse as ancient Chinese scrolls and Japanese sculptures, Fabergé eggs and brick walls, eighteenth-century pornography and animal rights literature, Hieronymous Bosch and Öyvind Fahlström. The sheer level of detail in his drawings defies the capacity of the eye to see and the mind to fully grasp them.

Noble was born in 1963 in Northumberland, England. He attended Sunderland Polytechnic, England, from 1982 to 1983 and Humberside College of Higher Education, Lincoln, England, from 1983 to 1986. Noble’s work has been part of numerous group exhibitions, including shows at the Museu de Arte de São Paulo (2001); Museum of Modern Art, New York (2002); Fabric Workshop and Museum, Philadelphia (2003); New Museum, New York (2003); Migros Museum für Gegenwartskunst, Zurich (2003); Istanbul Foundation for Culture and Arts (2003); Museo de Arte Contemporáneo de Monterrey, Mexico (2004); Louisiana Museum of Modern Art, Humlebaek, Denmark (2005); Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles (2005); Frances Lehman Loeb Art Center, Vassar College, Poughkeepsie, New York (2006); Neuberger Museum of Art, Purchase, New York (2008); Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego (2009); Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen, Rotterdam, Netherlands (2010); Tate Britain, London (2010); Kunsthalle Münster, Germany (2010–11); Caterina Tognon Arte Contemporanea, Venice (2011); Henry Moore Foundation, Perry Green, England (2014); and Marta Herford, Germany (2015). Recent solo museum exhibitions include the Migros Museum für Gegenwartskunst, Zurich (2005); Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen, Rotterdam, Netherlands (2005); and Nobson, Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen, Rotterdam, Netherlands (2014).

Noble lives and works in London.