Nick Goss: Eel Pie Hotel

23 Apr-27 May 2026

Overview

Josh Lilley is pleased to present Eel Pie Hotel, a solo exhibition of new work by British artist Nick Goss, inspired by the legendary Eel Pie Island Hotel, once located on an island in the Thames at Twickenham and destroyed by fire in the 1970s.

The exhibition centres on an ambitious body of paintings in which the river becomes a site of memory, imagination and historical drift. Rather than offering direct views of the hotel, the works evoke a journey along the Thames toward an elusive destination, where the building appears only in fragments, glimpsed through foliage, crowds or emptied interiors. Both subject and metaphor, the hotel emerges as a place where past and present collide. 

The exhibition also features a second major painting depicting an underground boxing match beneath a city underpass that has just concluded as a political demonstration surges into the space. Here, private intensity gives way to collective action, and boundaries between interior and exterior, individual and crowd, begin to dissolve. Figures spill from enclosed environments into public streets, echoing the exhibition’s broader concern with thresholds, transitions, and the porous edges between states of being.

Eel Pie Hotel extends Goss’s ongoing exploration of how images can hold multiple temporalities simultaneously, inviting viewers to navigate spaces that feel both familiar and uncanny. Rather than offering resolution, the works remain open-ended, encouraging the spectator to complete the journey themselves. In Goss’s work, the river becomes a conduit between past and present, surface and depth, the tangible and the imagined.