The Angst (2022)

No one could look at The Angst without Edward Much’s The Scream coming to mind, so raw are the emotions emanating from both works. Nicholls’s mixed media over-life-sized sculpture though successfully transforms in 3D what has been long ago identified as one of the most iconic works of the 20th century. Munch’s deep-seated feelings of anxiety were expressed through distortion of the figure’s contextual reality with the landscape taking on the fluid forms of Art Nouveau. In Nicholls’s Angst, the body, made of metal sheets welded together, forms a dynamic wave surging upwards, expressing likewise a distortion of reality, a conflictual context absorbed by the form itself. The sinuous shape evokes two raised arms holding a head between its hands. The natural bush stone, strategically hollowed out to form an open mouth with vacant eyes, becomes an inescapable head, immediately transforming the overall statue into a stylized humanoid form.

After two years of a global pandemic, when lockdowns had become a new way of life, The Angst undeniably evokes existential fear in a period riddled with uncertainty and anxiety, regardless of geo-localization. By using a hefty bush stone, found as is in his backyard and initially selected for its naturally ovoid shape, and by placing it between two parallel metal arms, Nicholls delves again into his commitment to nature by combining elements of it with his fondness for creating something new out of recycled materials. By creating a work which pushes the boundaries of former knowledge, the artist makes inescapable references to the mental health landscape left behind by the pandemic. Like Munch, he describes memories of an anxious emptiness and the meaninglessness of it all, feelings exacerbated by a deliberate lack of external details.