British artist Paul Noble has received widespread international recognition for his monumental eight-year project – the meticulous depiction of a fictional city called Nobson Newtown.

Noble is a master draughtsman, whose wall-sized drawings offer aerial perspectives over a fantastical cityscape that echoes the visionary ethos of projects such as the Garden City Movement. The exhibition in the Upper Galleries is the most extensive presentation of Paul Noble’s work to be held in Britain to date.

Taking us from the Shopping Mall to Ye Olde Ruin via the town centre, what appears as a bird’s eye view of urban devastation or ravaged forestry actually conceals quotations from Omar Khayyam’s Rubaiyat and T. S. Eliot’s The Wasteland. Noble also shows an enormous egg-shaped sculpture (described as ‘a cross between a Fabergé egg and a Grecian urn’), a black and white film and an embroidered modesty screen.

These works revolve around themes of birth, language, religion and ruin. Whether drawing from medieval illuminations, ancient Chinese scrolls or contemporary artists like Öyvind Fahlström and Robert Smithson, Noble’s project embodies a fascinating blend of utopian fantasy, social policies and historical perspectives. Paul Noble has been jointly organised with the migros museum für gegenwartskunst, Zurich.

After completing his degree in Fine Art at Humberside College of Higher Education in 1986, he moved to London, where he was a founding member of the artist-run gallery City Racing. At City Racing he held his first exhibitions, which consisted mostly of small narrative paintings and drawings suggesting infantile dream-like worlds.

Later he made whole installations based on a single narrative. The game was accompanied by comic-strip drawings that depicted the unemployed characters leading an aimless existence. Despite the bleakness of his themes, Noble's work is rich in visual delight.

Parodying the intense fantastical doodling of teenagers, his paintings, drawings and installations, in which he has invented whole new worlds, marked out a particular territory somewhere between despair and hilarity.

Noble further developed the theme of social hopelessness through the creation of a unique metaphorical urbanscape. Nobson (1998; exh. London, Chisenhale Gal., 1998) is presented as a vision of a utopian city rendered in very large and highly detailed graphite drawings.

Upon closer inspection, the dystopian nature of this imaginary city, its institutions such as the Nobspital, and its dysfunctional occupants becomes apparent.

Continuing the Nobson theme, Nobson Newtown (1998; exh. New York, Gorney, Bravin & Lee, 2000) depicts a cityscape in which the rows of buildings spell out the town's name in an orthogonally projected typeface. Noble described the work as ‘Town planning as self-portraiture', which helps explain the apparent lack of inhabitants, since the only inhabitant is the artist himself.