Sunday, October 19, 2014

Tom Hunter

Tom Hunter (born 1965, Dorset) explores themes depicting his local neighbourhood of east London, drawing on art historical references. His breakthrough came while studying at the Royal College of Art. A portrait of a young mother closely referenced Vermeer's A Girl Reading a Letter by an Open Window, except that Hunter's subject was reading an eviction notice from the council. This work, Woman Reading a Possession Order, won the John Kobal Photographic Portrait Award in 1998, and a year later was shown in Neurotic Realism at the Saatchi Gallery.

Hunter's Living in Hell and Other Stories, which used lurid headlines from the Hackney Gazette to re-stage scenes from art history was commissioned and exhibited by the National Gallery, London in 2006 - the first photography exhibition to be held there.

from Purdy Hicks Gallery

Chan-Hyo Bae

http://www.purdyhicks.com/display.php?aID=4http://www.purdyhicks.com/display.php?aID=4

Chan-Hyo Bae

Since graduating from the Slade School of Fine Art in 2007, Chan-Hyo Bae (born 1975, Busan, South Korea) has expressed in his work the feelings of cultural and emotional estrangement he experienced when he first came to study in England. His Existing in Costume series saw him posing in a variety of female historical western costumes. Researched in meticulous detail, he created elaborate scenes of himself as a noblewoman from Elizabethan to Regency periods.

More recent work has drawn further on the idea of placing oneself into a collective consciousness within the dimensions of nationality. Chan-Hyo Bae has chosen as his subject the realms of western fairytales: stories that have permeated our culture and become embedded into our general psyche. His current series depicts the subject of punishment related to the exercise of power.