Disengaged figures depicted against flat, colored backgrounds devoid of context are interpreted only through their clothes, expressions, and poses. The expansive paintings draw the onlooker into the picture, and although the figures are over-scaled, there is an intimacy to their presence. Free-floating prepubescent girls and adolescents knowingly look at the viewer, and one can not avoid their stare. At the same time, they show a stronger inward than outward gaze. The sitters seem to be asking for attention, but wanting to avoid interaction. They exhibit a range of attitudes from playful to serious, ordinary to mysterious, and engaged to disinterested.

Hoberman's photo-realist detail and limited depth-of-field allude to the Polaroids from which she works. However, she combines separate images and intentionally shifts perspective, postures, colors and compositions to create seductively idiosyncratic, almost dreamlike pictures.

While all her works acknowledge medieval paintings with flat densely colored backgrounds outlining figures in crisp detail, the compositions now have opened up to a sense of time like frames in a film. Here the ground is rarely background: as the pictures resist simple centrality of figure, turning it into pattern or pushing figures out to the edges, looping the picture like a rolling film or making the ground the medium in which a central figure floats, the ground is an event, often vivid, energized, almost threatening, and sometimes funny.

These hauntingly poignant portraits serve as reflections of our own psyche and emotional dislocation.

	Details from Nicky Hoberman's studio

(...) The task set for the spectator by these multiple figure paintings is paraphrased by many of their titles such as Hide and Seek and Camouflage. Hide and Seek refers not only to the game which the children in the painting are perhaps playing. It seems more to refer to what is revealed and what is concealed, what is there and what is absent (through the readings of the figures, their gestures and their relationship to each other). These paintings are not simply figurative accounts of the phenomena of a corporeal presence. They play upon uncertainties compounded by the complexities of the confrontation that the figure has with its viewer. These psychological uncertainties are intensified by the resonance of the child as a sign, and also throw into question and even mirror the viewers troubled response to the painting as a sign and as a surface. Mick Finch