Nick Hornby: Artist-in-Residence and Solo Exhibition

Ningbo Museum of Art
Ningbo, Zhejiang, China

Residency 24 September - 24 October 2026

Exhibition  20^th October – 20^th November 2026

Nick Hornby has been invited by Ningbo Museum of Art to undertake a month-long institutional residency in Ningbo, China, culminating in a solo exhibition at the museum.

Established in 2005, Ningbo Museum of Art's international Artist-in-Residence Programme invites a small number of artists each year to live and work in Ningbo, developing new work through research, production and cultural exchange. The programme has hosted 46 artists from 16 countries, the majority of them international.

During the residency, Hornby is working from a dedicated studio within the museum, developing new work in response to the visual, architectural and cultural histories of Ningbo and the surrounding region. The project continues his longstanding exploration of how images, monuments and historical forms shift in meaning as they move between cultures and contexts.

The residency and exhibition mark a significant new chapter in Hornby's engagement with China, placing his work within an institutional programme of international contemporary art and exchange.

Press Release 

6 Oct 2026

NICK HORNBY: COPY THAT / 收到

20th October – 20th November 2026, Ningbo Museum of Art, Ningbo, China
 
Nick Hornby presents new solo exhibition developed during residency in Ningbo, China: New works connect Chinese ink rubbing and Michelangelo with translation, perspective and digital reproduction

COPY THAT / 收到 begins with two found objects in Ningbo: a 16th-century carved stone stele from The Tianyi Pavilion, used to make ink rubbings, and a full-scale bronze reproduction of Michelangelo's David, standing in the piazza of the Ningbo National Theatre. One is a three-dimensional object designed to generate a reproducible image; the other is itself a reproduction, translated across material, geography and culture. At Tianyi Pavilion, the sixteenth-century library and cultural complex, a solid three-dimensional object becomes a reproducible flat image. In David, one of the defining objects of Western sculpture has been translated from marble into bronze, transported across the world and transformed into a civic symbol. Together, these encounters became the starting point for a new body of work examining what happens when objects move between three dimensions and two, sculpture and image, and physical and digital reproduction.

The exhibition title, COPY THAT / 收到, performs another act of translation. In English, "copy that" holds two meanings at once: reproduce this, and message received. In Chinese, 收到 means "received" or "understood". The bilingual title mirrors the exhibition's movement between copying, transmission, translation and reception.

Works in the show include a new six-foot sculpture combines the two discoveries, transforming David into a monumental stone-like printing block, as though Michelangelo's figure had become the matrix for a Chinese rubbing. A second duplication transforms Rodin's The Age of Bronze, reducing and flattening the figure. Positioned historically between the inherited tradition of the Western figurative body and the emergence of modern sculpture, Rodin's figure was originally considered so lifelike that he was accused of casting directly from his model. Hornby reverses that trajectory towards physical presence, digitally compressing the sculpture until the entire body is just 10 millimetres deep. Elsewhere, David is transformed through single-point perspective. Its figure lies flat against the floor while its edges rise and converge towards a single point. From most positions it appears abstract; from one precise viewpoint, the familiar figure resolves. The sculpture is arguably shorthand for the Renaissance, which in turn is emblematic of the creation of single point perspective. Conté rubbings and two moving-image works continue this movement between surface and volume, including a digitally deforming reclining figure carrying a photographic image of Cindy Crawford, and a rotating wireframe work combining Western architecture with forms drawn from William Chambers' eighteenth-century representations of China.

Hornby's practice has long used digital processes to intersect, compress and transform familiar cultural forms. In Ningbo, those processes begin instead with looking at the city itself: absorbing its objects, histories and systems of reproduction, then passing them through the language of his practice. Hornby says: “Finding David in Ningbo was both utterly surprising and somehow inevitable. David is almost the Coca-Cola of sculpture: you find it anywhere and everywhere. The stone rubbings at Tianyi Pavilion seemed like a perfect touchpoint for thinking about solid-state memory. Riffing between drawings, rubbings, augmented reality, animations, wireframe and inflatables – its been wonderful to play and assemble a collection of talking points to exhibit here.”

For further information and press images, please contact: Isaac Plowright isaac@nickhornby.com

NOTES TO EDITORS

About the Artist:

Nick Hornby (b. 1980) is a British artist whose sculpture combines digital technologies with references drawn from art history, architecture and the history of the monument. Recent public works include Power over Others is Weakness Disguised as Strength (2023), a five-metre Corten steel sculpture at Orchard Place, Westminster, London, for which he was awarded the 2024 PSSA Marsh Award for Excellence in Public Sculpture. His three major public commissions in London each critically reframe a core sculptural typology: the equestrian monument, the memorial and abstraction.

Hornby studied at the Slade School of Fine Art and Chelsea College of Arts. His work has been exhibited at Tate Britain, The Fitzwilliam Museum and The Museum of Arts and Design, New York. His work has been reviewed in The New York Times, Financial Times, Frieze and Artforum. He is a Fellow and Vice President of the Royal Society of Sculptors and an artist adviser to the Royal Mint Advisory Committee.

Exhibition Title: COPY THAT / 收到
Artist: Nick Hornby
Venue: Ningbo Museum of Art, Ningbo, China
Date: 20 October – 20 November 2026
Press Contact China: artiststu@nma.org.cn
Press contact UK: isaac@nickhornby.com

An essay can be read here