Happy Queen, 2003
Hales is delighted to announce Family Album, a solo exhibition by Guyanese-British artist Hew Locke. The artist’s sixth solo show with the gallery brings together new and historical works, highlighting a key arc of exploration in Locke’s practice — the iconography of royalty. Throughout his career Locke has been concerned with symbolic embodiments of power and empire, displayed in this show through two key bodies of work spanning across two decades – The House of Windsor and Souvenirs. The exhibition at Hales coincides with Locke’s show What have we here?, opening at the British Museum on the 17th of October 2024, and precedes his expansive survey exhibition at the Yale Center for British Art (Connecticut, USA), opening in autumn 2025.
Locke (b.1959 Edinburgh, Scotland) spent his formative years in Guyana before returning to the UK to study Fine Art at Falmouth (1988) followed by an MA in Sculpture at the Royal College of Art (1994). He was elected a member of the Royal Academy of Arts in 2022 and was awarded an OBE for Services to Art in 2023. Locke lives and works in London. Growing up in Georgetown, Guyana, which was newly independent, colonial remnants remained prominently present in everyday life on school textbooks, as public statues and old coinage. This early experience stayed with the artist, who continues to make depictions of the royal family.
The exhibition at Hales is anchored by five monumental royal portraits from The House of Windsor series – a renowned body of work which includes cardboard portraits, sculptural heads as well as smaller scale drawings and watercolours. These detailed cardboard heads are imposing, intricately patterned, hand cut, using a knife like a pen, then monochromatically painted. Iconic, the royal family are one of the most recognisable symbols of British identity. Locke draws attention to these subjects with humour and a sense of the outlandish, illuminating both history and contemporary relevance with nuance, while also leaving interpretation open-ended. Curator Kris Kuramitsu notes that in The House of Windsor, ‘Locke renders them [the royal family] with a lavish attention that denies a simple negative reading.’ 1
Cardboard has featured prominently in Locke’s oeuvre, as he uses this common packing material to speak to global trade and commodification. From portraits to complex architectural structures, cardboard accented with white paint and black marker pen is synonymous with the artist. Locke’s use of materials, elevating the cheap and ubiquitous to something magnificent, has become his personal language. Hemmed in Two (2000), a complex cardboard structure, part boat, part caravanserai, part fairground ride, was once installed in the Victoria and Albert Museum and is now in the collection of the Perez Art Museum Miami. Cardboard Palace (2002), another large-scale installation created for an exhibition at the Chisenhale Gallery in London, was an expansive series of architectural rooms through which you walked, featuring images of royalty. More recently Locke has created figures incorporating cardboard for his significant commission The Procession at Tate Britain (2022), which toured to the Baltic Centre for Contemporary Art in Gateshead and the ICA Boston, Massachusetts. Similar figures The Watchers also feature in his show at the British Museum (2024), which includes new works interacting with pieces from their permanent collection.
Alongside historical works from the House of Windsor series are several new sculptures by Locke from his ongoing and internationally renowned body of work titled Souvenirs. Originally started in 2018, Souvenirs are antique Parian ware busts of royalty adorned with various regalia. They have been exhibited in Locke’s solo exhibition at Ikon Gallery, Birmingham Here’s the Thing (2018), group show Life Between Islands, Tate Britain (2021/2022) and are in the collections of the V&A Museum, Birmingham Museum and Art Gallery and the Baltimore Museum of Art, among others.
Opening Hours
Wed-Sat 10am-6pm and by appointment
Location:
The Tea Building
London, E1 6LA
Text and pictures, copyright hales and the artist