CHARLIE SMITH LONDON was delighted
to present Hugh Mendes’ second solo exhibition at the gallery.
Mendes is well recognised for his
ongoing, obsessional series of obituary paintings. In this exhibition he
presented a collection of intimate oil paintings of dead artists. Operating
simultaneously as portraits and still life paintings, these works are contemporary
memento mori, serving as reminders of our mortality to both artist and audience.
Being obituaries of deceased artists only, this was Mendes’ most personal
exhibition to date. They are wistful, ritualistic memorials to artists that
Mendes has known and / or admired, including Anthony Caro, Lucian Freud, Chris
Burden and Robert Rauschenberg.
Beyond a rendition of a given
subject, Mendes’ practice is an investigation into the process of image making,
exploring both historical and modern strategies. Walter Benjamin states in The
Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction:
“The uniqueness of a work of art
is inseparable from its being imbedded in the fabric of tradition. This
tradition itself is thoroughly alive and extremely changeable.”
Mendes engages with 16th
century Dutch still life painting; portrait painting from Vermeer to Gerhard
Richter; Andy Warhol’s disaster and headline series; historical and
contemporary photography; and mass reproduction in the form of newspaper and digital
media. Predominantly, a Mendes obituary is composed of a painting of a
photograph of his subject in combination with text, and a subtle allusion to
the notion of still life by employing a drop shadow to suggest a newspaper
cutting. However, within this collection we often find an artist represented by
their artwork, and so the subject is a photograph of an artwork, which has been
filtered through the newspaper medium. Both manual and mechanical reproduction
must be considered an essential component of his work therefore.
This calls to question notions of
authorship. Roland Barthes in The Death of the Author:
“We know now that a text is not a
line of words releasing a single “theological” meaning (the ‘message’ of the
Author-God) but a multi-dimensional space in which a variety of writings, none
of them original, blend and clash. The text is a tissue of quotations drawn
from the innumerable centres of culture.”
The generational nature of
Mendes’ paintings, both in the means of production as well as reference points,
illustrates this, positioning him very much in a post-modern context. By
adopting a methodology that involves interacting with sequential images and
across media, he simultaneously affirms and denies authorship. The aura of the
original is negated as that of the new object emerges.
Please contact gallery for further information
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Obituary: Albert Irvin | 2015 | Oil on linen | 30x35cm |
|
Obituary: Andrew Wyeth | 2015 | Oil on linen | 35x20cm |
|
Obituary: Anthony Caro | 2015 | Oil on linen | 35x25cm |
|
Obituary: Brian Sewell | 2016 | Oil on linen | 30x20cm |
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Obituary: Bruce Lacey | 2016 | Oil on linen | 30x20cm |
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Obituary: Chantal Akerman | 2016 | Oil on linen | 25x30cm |
|
Obituary: Chris Burden | 2016 | Oil on linen | 35x25cm |
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Obituary: David Weiss | 2015 | Oil on linen | 30x35cm |
|
Obituary: Dorothea Tanning | 2012 | Oil on linen | 30x20cm |
|
Obituary: Ellsworth Kelly | 2016 | Oil on linen | 30x35cm |
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Obituary: Franz West | 2015 | Oil on linen | 30x20cm |
|
Obituary: Irving Penn | 2015 | Oil on linen | 30x20cm |
|
Obituary: Jane Bown (Bacon) | 2015 | Oil on linen | 35x25cm |
|
Obituary: Lucian Freud | 2016 | Oil on linen | 35x25cm |
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Obituary: Nancy Holt | 2016 | Oil on linen | 35x45cm |
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Obituary: Nancy Spero | 2015 | Oil on linen | 35x25cm |
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Obituary: Noah Davis | 2016 | Oil on linen | 30x35cm |
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Obituary: On Kawara | 2014 | Oil on linen | 25x30cm |
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Obituary: Otto Piene | 2015 | Oil on linen | 30x20cm |
|
Obituary: Rene Burri (Picasso) | 2015 | Oil on linen | 35x25cm |
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Obituary: Richard Hamilton | 2015 | Oil on linen | 35x25cm |
|
Obituary: Robert Rauschenberg | 2015 | Oil on linen |
35x25cm |
|
Obituary: Sigmar Polke | 2015 | Oil on linen | 35x25cm |
|
Obituary: Sol LeWitt | 2015 | Oil on linen | 30x20cm |
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