Seminar: Artist Talk: Oppositions – How to generate an object
Speaker: Paul Hodgson
Date: 3 February 2022, Thursday
Venue: Digital Platform, Zoom
Paul Hodgson will focus on the theme of ‘oppositions’, encompassing reduction / internal complexities, exclusion/ inclusion, inaction / agency - using these categories as tools to analyse his artistic practice in terms of concepts, dominant visual language, narrative elements and historical reference.
By making use of developments in digital technology, and combining them with painting, photography and film, Hodgson has made works that explore the language of portraiture and its broader relationship to human body language and intentionality. This has led him to an interest in how an image is constructed, the use of objects as surrogate figures, the hybridisation of mediums, and the re-positioning of the viewer in relation to the object and image in front of them.
Hodgson will discuss a range of projects and bodies of work, including Reluctant Creator (2002) Houldsworth, London; Marie-Thérèse, 1928 (2005); The Battle of the Somme, Imperial War Museum, London (2006); Sovereign Rights (2007), New Works, Marlborough Fine Art, London (2010), Figures and Screens (2011-2012); Sculptor’s Studio (2018-2022). He will also give an account of the changing nature of the London art scene over the last twenty years.
About Paul Hodgson
Paul Hodgson creates hybrid works that incorporate photography, digital print, and paint, and that defy neat categorization. His work is indebted to the history of Western painting, and certain of his earlier works reference the colours, lighting, and figurative poses of iconic art historical works, but they are manipulated and restructured to bring to the fore a contemporary reading of the image. Subsequent works have seen Hodgson concentrate on historical epochs of expansion and transition, using the conventions of portraiture and figure painting to construct large-scale tableaux vivant - alongside intimate studio portraits - to explore moments of great change, but also of ambiguous merit.
In recent works, he has chosen to use a relatively confined space in which to construct each scene. Working with a set of simple objects, his focus has been the placement and positioning of objects and figures in space (and in front of a camera) as a means to explore notions of gesture and intentionality within the process of image making.
Paul Hodgson was born in Shrewsbury in 1972 and lives and works in London. Selected group exhibitions include ‘The Rising Tide’, Milstein Exhibition Centre, Cambridge University (2019); ‘Beauty by Design’, Scottish National Portrait Gallery, Edinburgh (2014-15); ‘Image Search: Photography from the Collection’, Pérez Art Museum Miami (2013-2014); ‘Unbounded’, Proje4L, Elgiz Museum of Contemporary Art, Istanbul (2011); ‘The Battle of the Somme’, Imperial War Museum, London (2006); ‘Working with Light’, Harewood House, UK (2006); ‘Light and Atmosphere’, Miami Art Museum (2004); ‘The Schweppes Photographic Portrait Prize’, National Portrait Gallery, London (2003). Selected solo exhibitions include University of Cambridge, UK (2010); Marlborough Fine Art, London (2010 and 2007); Feigen Contemporary, New York (2005); M.K.Ciurlionis National Museum of Art, Kaunas (2004); Houldsworth, London (2002 and 2003).