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From The Ghetto to the National Gallery, Tom Hunter continues to explore themes that depict his local neighbourhood, drawing on art historical references to paint Hackney in a different light to the usual lurid newspaper stories of urban blight. Three years ago Paul Wombell curated a group exhibition for Photo España in Madrid drawing attention to what he said was a small but growing band of photographers who were re

Tom Hunter has an approach to work that is both serious and considered. Rather than the veil of humour and irony that masks much of contemporary art, Hunter’s work is unashamedly artful. Moreover, his position is not solely expressed by nods to the story of art. For equally, the work is socially aware and engaged with the chronicle of our contemporary world. Hunter inhabits a place of his own creation (much lik

Tom Hunter takes a look behind London’s façades and shows us how life there really is The meticulously composed, painterly tableaux of Tom Hunter (*1965 in Dorset) operate on various levels: for one, he references important paintings from art history; for another, he tells us stories of our time—stories that all take place in the London borough of Hackney, where Hunter lives. What is perhaps his best-known photograph

Death and Space Tue 23 October 2012, 6.15 pm for a 6.30pm start £5 full price; £3 student, unemployed and over 65s The Deadhouse, Somerset House, The Strand, WC2R 1LA ‘Death and the Contemporary’ is a series of site-specific events organised by Dr Georgina Colby and Anthony Luvera that will take place across the capital in October 2012. Panel discussions with keynote philosophers, writers, visual artists, and theoris

BBC Radio 3, March 2011 In this essay I will try to describe the driving influence behind my art, in the work of Johannes Vermeer, who lived in 17th century Holland. This came as a complete surprise to me when I was a young upstart, striving for social justice in a squat in Hackney. While looking for a radical approach to my art, I found a revolutionary artist working in the most traditional of art forms. I first cam

On view at Purdy Hicks Gallery 4 October – 3 November 2012 A MIDSUMMER NIGHT’S DREAM A series of nine works commissioned by the Royal Shakespeare Company, originally exhibited at the PACCAR Room, Royal Shakespeare Theatre, Stratford-upon-Avon. Tom Hunter’s series A Midsummer Night’s Dream is inspired by Shakespeare’s play and the paintings of Romantic artist Henry Fuseli. This contemporary reworking of the play is se