Hugo Wilson : Havoc

3 Dec 2020-6 Feb 2021

Overview

Hugo Wilson’s work constitutes an investigation of images and their ability to represent ideological positions. Wilson combines motifs and forms from Western art history and from a variety of cultural sources – including Old Master paintings, Japanese woodcuts, Graeco-Roman and Baroque sculpture and contemporary sci-fi movies – in order to explore the ways in which systems of belief and ideology are encoded in culture over time. In his paintings and sculptures, Wilson deliberately manipulates and triggers our shared cultural references. In his new work Wilson has developed techniques to push this process further than ever before. His new charcoal drawings are created by layering multiple images until everything hovers at the edge of recognition and legibility, allowing meaning to become something fluid rather than fixed. Nonetheless, recognisable motifs – a tree, a figure, a halo – emerge from the images and may allow us to anchor our perceptions.