Tom Hunter shows at the Courtauld Institute of Art

Material Matters: The Power of the Medium

http://www.courtauld.ac.uk/east_wing/

Friday 20 January 2012 - July 2013

The tenth in the Courtauld Institute of Art's biennial student-run exhibitions will be a celebration of artists that use pioneering media or re-interpret traditional forms of representation. East Wing X is committed to showcasing emerging artists alongside well-known exhibitors in this anniversary collection and will include works by Gabriel Dawe, Heringa/Van Kalsbeek, Damien Hirst and Tom Hunter.

East Wing X

The Courtauld Institute of Art

Somerset House, Strand

London WC2R 0RN

Tom Hunter shows at the Green on Red Gallery Dublin

http://www.greenonredgallery.com/exhibition.php?intProjectID=105

New work 
John Cronin, John Graham, Tom Hunter, Mark Joyce, Arno Kramer, Alice Maher, Fergus Martin, Niamh McCann, Caroline McCarthy, Ronan McCrea, Bea McMahon, Dennis McNulty, Niamh O'Malley, Nigel Rolfe

            15 Dec - 21 Jan 2012

Opening reception: Thursday 15 December, 6 - 8pm, All are welcome

Opening hours

Tuesday - Friday 10.00 - 18.00 
Saturday 13.00 - 16.00
Sunday Closed 
Monday by appointment

Location

            26-28 Lombard Street East, Dublin 2

            Telephone +353 1 671 3414

            info@greenonredgallery.com

Tom Hunter at the National Gallery London

^{Seduced by Art: Photography Past and Present}

31 October 2012 – 20 January 2013
Sainsbury Wing
Admission Charge

http://www.nationalgallery.org.uk/about-us/press-and-media/exhibitions-programme-2012

Today’s photography is part of our own cultural moment, but it also arises from artistic traditions that long predate it. ‘Seduced by Art: Photography Past and Present’ is an engaging discussion of historical influences on both early photography of the mid-19th century and contemporary photography.

This ground-breaking exhibition brings together exceptional examples of early and contemporary photography. Works will include those by leading photographers – including Tom Hunter, Thomas Struth, Craigie Horsfield, Sam Taylor-Wood and Beate Gütschow – who trace their sources back to 19th-century photography or, in some cases, even older art historical traditions.

Across 150 years, old and new controversies are part of this story. The exhibition explores the dialogue between the history of art, the art of the 19th century and modern photographers. It also maps the development of photography as it evolved from the 19th century to reassess traditional subjects such as still life, landscape and social portraiture.

The exhibition includes works from the Wilson Centre for Photography and loans from Tate, the Victoria and Albert Museum, the National Media Museum in Bradford and directly from the artists themselves.

Tom Hunter shows at the Moderna Museet, Stockholm

Photography from the Moderna Museet Collection

Stockholm 1 February 2011 - 19 February 2012

http://www.modernamuseet.se/en/stockholm/exhibitions/the-moderna-museet-collection/written-in-light/

Written in Light

Tom Hunter in Design Week

Hackney or not Hackney, that is the question

Tue, 25 Oct 2011 | By Emily Gosling

Tree surgeon to photographer isn’t, perhaps, the most usual career trajectory. Becoming a photographer who recreates Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream in East London’s Hackney, perhaps even less so.

Dorset-born Tom Hunter first arrived in London to work as a tree surgeon in Regents Park, where he fell in love with Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream having seen the open air production for free, in return for letting the audience sit on the logs from trees he had felled.

Inspiring our second Shakespeare-based-art blog in as many weeks, Hunter has created a series of nine photographs using scenes from the play, which will be displayed in an exhibition opening in the Royal Shakespeare Theatre next week.

margin-le

Hunter scoured Hackney high and low for a suitable cast, which includes samba dancers, a stripper, youngsters from the borough and a local band.

In one image, London’s staunchly city-dwelling pearly kings and queens are pictured in their native East London, but surrounded by the countryside insignia of horses and hounds.

Meanwhile, Titania takes the form of a Hackney Samba Queen; and the enchanting Helena is a stripper, playing on the notions of performance, and also draws parallels between the Elizabethan Maypole and the strip club’s pole.

Hunter says, ‘All these people are involved in their own performances. They live in parallel worlds, which rarely overlap. I really love the way Shakespeare has mixed everybody up…as our society gets more complicated, it gets more disconnected. The groups never seem to touch.’

For the exhibition, the photographs are hung in the chronological order of the play, meaning that while each is very much an individual image, they also work as part of the larger narrative.

Tom Hunter: A Midsummer Night’s Dream runs from 4 November  – 1 April 2012 at the PACCAR Room, Royal Shakespeare Theatre, Stratford-upon-Avon

Tom Hunter: A Midsummer Night's Dream at the RSC

Tom Hunter awarded Honorary Doctorate

The University of East London is to present Tom Hunter with an Honorary Doctorate of Arts in recognition of his great artistic work documenting the life of the East End of London.

This honorary degree was proposed by the students, staff and governors in recognition of success in his own field but also in embodying the values and aims of the University.

'You have, of course, achieved great success as a nationally and internationally renowned photographic artist. Your work documenting the lives of the people of east London, and highlighting the issues facing them and their communities, was a particular focus of your nomination. Your focus on the importance of communities, particular east end communities, is one that we share, and your success is an inspiration to our students.'

Extract from the letter from the University of East London. 

Tom Hunter photo in The Observer, New Review, 17 April

http://www.guardian.co.uk/culture/2011/apr/17/royal-wedding-tom-hunter-photograph

Tom Hunter on BBC radio 3

Tom Hunter

Irish Times Review of my Dublin show at the Green on Red gallery

http://www.irishtimes.com/newspaper/features/2011/0209/1224289333827.html

Photographer Tom Hunter’s remarkable work refers directly to classical art. However, it is far more than a homage, invested as it is with several layers of contemporary meaning, writes AIDAN DUNNE 

IF ANY ONE image marked Tom Hunter’s arrival as an artist of note it was a photograph that eventually formed part of a series titled Persons Unknown. This particular work, made when he was preparing for his master’s degree show, is called Woman Reading a Possession Order . In it we see a young woman, in profile, standing facing a window and reading a letter. An infant lying on a richly coloured blanket occupies the foreground. The composition is closely based on the painting by Vermeer, A Girl Reading at an Open Window. 

The piece is typical of Hunter’s approach in that he creates a photographic tableau that refers directly to a classical painting, but is invested with several layers of contemporary meaning rather than just being a pastiche. At the time, he was himself living in a squat and the woman was his next-door neighbour. He was trying to make an image that expressly contradicted the politically inspired propaganda of the time, which depicted squatters as inherently antisocial troublemakers.

One morning, letters arrived from the local council, addressed to “persons unknown”, telling them they were being evicted. Remarkably, his photograph attracted so much attention that the planned demolition of the houses they were occupying never went ahead. The scene is staged, but it’s also a historical document, dealing with real people and real issues, and pointing us towards historical resonances in art history. As Hunter notes, Vermeer and his contemporaries were among the first European artists to depict ordinary people rather than nobles, mythological figures or biblical characters.

The squat was in Hackney in London, where Hunter still lives. The borough has formed the substance of his work in one way or another since he began exhibiting, including his current show at Green on Red Gallery, Unheralded Stories . He is not a Londoner, but was born and grew up in a small Dorset village. As he observes, “Maybe I couldn’t quite cope with living in London, so I set about making a village of it. But that’s what we do: we re-create the world in our own neighbourhoods”. And that is what Unheralded Stories is about.

Hunter left school early and worked for several years – not that happily – as a farm labourer, for the Forestry Commission and eventually as a tree surgeon. He realised he loved photography when he brought a camera with him while working for the US Forestry Service in Puerto Rico for a year.

That spurred him to do an A-level and study photography at the London College of Printing, going on to complete his MA at the Royal College of Art.

Even as a student he produced extraordinarily accomplished work, not just in a technical sense but also in terms of conceptual coherence.

As with Woman Reading a Possession Order, time and again he has been motivated to visualise and articulate a sense of community and identity in response to negative press or political commentary. The title of his 1994 Ghetto series, consisting of beautiful contextual portraits of fellow squatters in their homes in Hackney, derives from the Hackney Gazette ’s description of their area as “a crime-ridden, derelict ghetto, a cancer . . .”

He has been consistently painterly in his approach. Not that he tries to imitate painterly effects in any way – he sees painting as being inherently abstracted. Rather, he is invariably attuned and responsive to the history of representation in western art, and his own relationship to it. He views the great historical and mythological themes of classical painting, not as something apart from, but as intrinsic to our lives, in Hackney as elsewhere.

In one series, Living in Hell and Other Stories, the sensational headlines and stories from the Hackney Gazette provide the subject matter for tableaux with references to a range of paintings, some of them iconic. Unheralded Stories extends this method. The stories are those of a number of individuals living in Hackney, painstakingly gathered – the involvement, the gathering, is very much part of Hunter’s process – and reimagined with reference to classical mythology and painting. Not so much with reference to, perhaps, as in the form of.

The show consists of paired images of, as Hunter puts it, “stages and players”. In one image we see a narrative scene; in its partner an empty communal interior.

Photographed with a pinhole camera, the latter are “spaces in which people meet, not commercial spaces. They’re community and parish halls, meeting rooms for immigrants, prayer rooms, those sort of interiors”. Each is significant in relation to its adjoining “players” image. “It’s as if in one image we see the drama; in the other the space in which it might be enacted,” he explains.

The dramas are all local, but they appropriate the wider physical and mythological world, making the village universal. One, Mole Man, involves a famous – or infamous – Hackney eccentric, William Lyttle, an immigrant Irish labourer whose labours took a distinctive turn. For decades he tunnelled beneath his house, creating a labyrinth that, as Hunter recalls it, led to traffic diversions and fears of major collapses when his subterranean excavations were discovered.

Even when he was retired to a residential institution, like the character in The Count of Monte Cristo he kept on tunnelling. Hunter links his story to Giordano’s 1666 painting, Fall of the Rebel Angels , and underground Hackney becomes Hades. The image of Lyttle in his tunnels is paired with a view of Stoke Newington Town Hall arranged for a tea dance.

In Death of the Party , two young women are depicted in a spare interior, the morning after the night before, evidently wiped out by the party of the title. Their poses are modelled on Caravaggio’s austere painting Death of the Virgin .

Another work features the daughter of friends who, Hunter noticed, “makes beautiful drawings of dragons and angels”. Hunter, drawing on Ingres’s painting of Roger rescuing Angelica in an episode from Ariosto’s Orlando Furioso, transposes her to a “forest” of hogweed stems in Hackney.

With Hunter, each picture really does tell a story, on several levels, and elaborates on the heterogeneous complexity of individuals and communities, prompting us to take the long, considered view. Unheralded Stories makes up an exceptionally rich body of work and a terrific exhibition.

Unheralded Stories Photographs by Tom Hunter. Green on Red Gallery, 26-28 Lombard Street, Dublin. Exhibition runs until March.

Tom Hunter review in the Financial Times

http://www.ft.com/cms/s/2/0fef8cf2-0d51-11e0-82ff-00144feabdc0.html#axzz1ALWYfpFM

Tradition: Tom Hunter’s ‘Death of Coltelli’ (2009)

Tom Hunter is not the first photographer to make his own village into his canvas. Robert Doisneau, born in the modest Parisian suburb of Gentilly, became the poet of the narrow, careful living of postwar France, a journalist with an engaged but outside eye. Tom Hunter creates tableaux in Hackney, his east London home, in which it is clear that everything has been set up by the photographer. His characters are Hackney dwellers but they are also actors under his direction.

These obvious differences mask substantial similarities. Doisneau was certainly not above elaborate setting-up: he once waited days in a darkened shop to photograph passers-by looking (sneakily or with Rabelaisian glee) at a nude he’d placed specifically to catch their eyes. Hunter, conversely, has been concerned with the daily news, and made many of his tableaux in direct response to stories in the local Hackney papers. He manages to describe the specifically local in such a way as to attain relevance far beyond the bounds of the borough, even anchoring certain elements of his pictures on familiar great paintings. His most famous picture was of a girl in Hackney reading an eviction notice in mimicry of a Vermeer.

His most direct borrowing in the new series is a picture called “Anchor and Hope”. In a remake of the American Andrew Wyeth’s famous “Christina’s World” (1948), in which a girl stricken with polio crawls across a dry summery field, Hunter has a girl crawl across the lush marshes of the river Lea towards the pub which gives his picture its (evocative) name.

Where the girl in the Wyeth is only just in motion, Hunter’s version is more obviously making progress. We can see the trampled grasses left in her wake. Is she struggling towards a promised land of housing projects and a not-obviously attractive pub? Has she been abandoned in the marsh, to make her way back or not as may be? Each picture has these uncertainties, and they are what give them so much narrative texture. They demand repeated thought and repay it.

As often with Hunter, many of the images in the new series have a languid sadness about them which is curiously appealing. In “The Death of the Party”, two girls nurse hangovers or remorse in an interior of precisely that kind of artists’ chic which interior decorators strive so impotently to recreate. Above their heads, two oversize bulbs burn with a mildly sickly yellow glow, perfect real-world transcriptions of the thought-bubbles of so many cartoons. What are these girls thinking? What happened last night? We find ourselves trying to fill the empty thought bubbles, to complete the narrative so ably started by Hunter.

A picture called “The Death of Coltelli” shows a bare-chested girl draped on a bed in a manner that is definitely familiar. Judicious prompting brings the reference: Delacroix’s “Death of Sardanapalus”, in the Louvre. Thank you. Hunter’s references are buried quite deep: you won’t necessarily catch each one. But they act as thickening ingredients all the same. Where the Delacroix is positively operatic (the painting was itself the inspiration for an opera by Liszt), Hunter confines himself to the simpler chords of the blues. But the harmonies of the romantic painting beyond are still there. Even if you miss the reference altogether, the fact that the girl is posed for tragedy in a way that no sensible girl would adopt makes it certain that something beyond merely slavish photographic realism is in play. It’s a very effective strategy. The single figure of the photographed girl is surrounded by ghosts, the crowd of other figures around her painted original.

These bigger, weightier tableaux are accompanied by another series, of smaller room interiors from various institutions around Hackney. Community centres, churches, dance halls and so on, all photographed straight down their longest axis in murky available light. They are stagey places, built to tame the wild dramas taking place on the streets outside. The very regularity of the series gives the game away: the people of Hackney don’t fit easily into these places. The community centre interiors are not very likable pictures but they do make yet another texture to lie under the main ones.

‘Unheralded Stories’, Purdy Hicks Gallery, London until January 15. www.purdyhicks.com

Tom Hunter in the Hackney Gazette

http://www.hackneygazette.co.uk/news/mole_man_s_cellar_features_in_tom_hunter_s_hackney_photos_1_770454

The photos in Tom Hunter’s latest project, Unheralded Stories, have all been inspired by tales he has heard from Hackney residents – and all of them were shot in the borough.

Hide and Seek

With the pictures, some ethereal, some exotic, the 45-year-old wanted to show that you don’t need to travel the world to find amazing landscapes and stories, because they are all around you.

“It’s almost like I want to show the whole world is in Hackney,” said the 45-year old who lives in Eleanor Road, London Fields.

By way of example he talks about the beautiful shot of a woman underneath a waterfall.

It was 5am and his friend Claire was standing below the bitterly cold Regent’s Canal sluice in Victoria Park as the sun rose.

Woodberry

“I always said when I was younger I would go to Victoria Falls in Africa, but I’ve bought Africa to Hackney,” said Tom, who is best known for his photo sculpture The Ghetto, now on permanent display at the Museum of London.

“It’s about getting people to look at the ordinary life around them, and to look at it in more magical terms,” he said.

“What painters like Caravaggio have created is seen as something magical now, but our life in Hackney is magical too.

“What I do is take the people around me and put them on a larger stage, with gods and angels and dragons and monsters.”

Fall of the Night

Given that Tom is influenced by myths and legends, it is fitting that the collection portrays one of Hackney’s greatest legends, the Mole Man, in the underworld for which he is famous.

Tom bumped into William Lyttle just around the corner from his house in Mortimer Road, after a meal in a Vietnamese restaurant.

The oddball gained worldwide fame as the Mole Man after he spent 40 years digging a 60-foot network of tunnels beneath his £1 million home.

“I think he started the conversation, asking us where we had been that night, and he went into a rant about the council and about how they were trying to get him. He wanted someone to confess his grievance to,” said Tom, who, having read all about the Mole Man in the Hackney Gazette, realised who was talking to him.

Hackney Cut

Mr Lyttle invited him back to his house and Tom got a glimpse of the Aladdin’s cave of junk inside – just weeks before the Mole Man was evicted by the council in 2008.

“It looked like a bomb site and he showed me his little tunnels. It reminded me of a bit of a scrapyard and the mentality of some folk where I grew up in Dorset,” said Tom.

“He’s a hoarder, which you can afford to do in the countryside when you have land – but he’s taken that mentality to the city, and he’s expanded his empire into the subterranean world.”

Although he didn’t want himself to be photographed, Mr Lyttle allowed Tom to go back a couple of weeks later to mock up a photo that he describes as a “subterranean underworld of Hades, showing the Mole Man laid out in a hell of his own making”.

Mole Man

“Sadly, the Mole Man passed away this year, so the work becomes an epitaph to a great life,” said Tom.

Unheralded Stories is on display at Purdy Hicks Gallery, Bankside, SE1, until January 15.

Guardian review of 'A Palace for Us', 'This is a magical film' says Jonathan Jones

http://www.guardian.co.uk/artanddesign/2010/dec/09/tom-hunter-serpentine-gallery-review

New ideas are everywhere in British politics. Let's measure national happiness! Let's make welfare proactive! The problem is that so many of these big ideas for a "big society" come from a government whose painful economic policies make the enthusiastic ideological overproduction look like the most cynical window-dressing – liberal-minded tinsel on a Tory tree whose needles turn out to be razors. Is nobody doing any ambitious social thinking that is not a veil for callous cuts?

Step forward, the Serpentine gallery. This will come as no surprise to fans of its co-director Hans Ulrich Obrist, whose publications, projects and patronage of artists amount to a sustained attempt to reconnect art, ideas, and the world and have made the Serpentine the most creative public art space in London. The latest manifestation of the slightly wacky sense of mission that flourishes at the Serpentine is a community art project with a difference. Skills Exchange brings together artists and community groups and makes a point of linking young artists and older people: out of a residency by artist Tom Hunter on the Woodberry Down estate in Hackney, east London, comes a film he made with older residents called A Palace for Us.

This is a magical film. It weaves the memories of people who grew up in east London and have lived on the estate since it opened into a silvery thread of meaning illuminated by dramatisations of their experiences filmed in the aged, but dignified, Woodberry Down buildings and public spaces. The estate, begun in 1946 and completed in 1963, was like a "palace" to those who remembered the East End slums, remembers one participant. But the film is also a palace of memory. Contemporary art often seems obsessed with youth: here it listens to the stories the old have to tell.

It evokes all our stories. Britain in 1945, out of the ruins of war, built the welfare state that clever rich kids are now so casually pulling apart. Estates like Woodberry Down embody an ideal of decent housing for all that was born out of the miseries of the 1930s and terror of the 1940s. A Palace for Us gently and acutely bears witness to this history that is now being dismantled.

Hunter's film is not a rant, but a moving homage to lives and memories that today are obliterated by harsh and violent caricatures of the white working class. Everyone should go to the Serpentine to learn to see through his subjects' eyes. The government should go.

Limited Edition by Tom Hunter at the Serpentine Galery

On the occasion of the first screening of A Palace for Us by Tom Hunter, the Serpentine Gallery is delighted to present a limited edition print by the artist.


In Hunter's oeuvre, there is a rare harmony to be found in the duality of nods to art history plus voiceable convictions. Each of the twin impulses are felt with harmonious gravity.
From an essay on Tom Hunter by Art critic Tim Birch, 2003

Tom Hunter
Woodberry 2010
Premier C Type Print
45cm x 35cm
Edition of 150
£85.11 excl. VAT (£100 incl. VAT)


English artist Tom Hunter (b.1965) is a London based film maker and photographer.

Hunter's works reflect his intimate knowledge of east London while simultaneously making direct references to specific compositions within art history. Often influenced by headlines of local newspapers, Hunter's work explores histories of the area and the relationships he has with the people who live there.

This edition exclusively made for the Serpentine is entitled Woodberry, after the Woodberry Down Estate that was constructed in the aftermath of World War II. Completed in 1962 the estate was herladed as an 'estate of the future', providing 2,500 homes for people living in impoverished accommodation in the area. Today it is the site of a major regeneration project.

Tom Hunter graduated from the London College of Printing in 1994 and from the Royal College of Art in 1997. Solo exhibitions include Life and Death in Hackney, White Cube, London, 2000; Living in Hell and Other Stories, National Gallery, London 2005-2006; Flashback, Museum of London, 2009-2010; and Unheralded Stories at Purdy Hicks Gallery, November 2010 – January 2011. His works are included in collections at the National Gallery, London; Victoria & Albert Museum, London; Los Angeles County Museum of Art; and the Saatchi Collection, London.

This edition and film were commissioned by the Serpentine Galllery on the occasion of the regeneration project and are part of the Serpentine Gallery’s Skills Exchange programme in which artists, designers and architects work in collaboration with older people, care workers, young people and activists to exchange skills and develop ideas for social and architectural change.


To purchase this Limited Edition by Tom Hunter please contact:

Tom Harrisson, Editions Manager
T + 44 (0)20 7298 1511
editions@serpentinegallery.org
or visit www.serpentinegallery.org/shopping

Arts Insider Interview: Tom Hunter

Follow link below for interview

http://newsevents.arts.ac.uk/18706/arts-insider-interview-tom-hunter/

One of Britain’s most significant contemporary artists, Tom Hunter set a precedent in modern art history as the first photographic artist to be granted a solo show at London’s National Gallery.

Hunter’s work is unique in its formal compositions which draw on art historical references, distinctive for his compelling, socially engaged subject matter, and identifiable for its humane gaze, sincere compassion and respect for his subjects. Taking as his muse the people of Hackney, East London, Hunter draws on the language of old master paintings, deploying their gestures, lighting and composition to imbue his subjects with a sense of drama and dignity.

Hunter has currently three new exhibitions opening in London: Unheralded Stories at Purdy Hicks, Please Write at Posted and A Palace For Us at the Serpentine. In 2008 Hunter’s solo show A Journey Back was held at the Arts Gallery.

Tom Hunter show on the BBC

http://news.bbc.co.uk/local/london/hi/people_and_places/arts_and_culture/newsid_9225000/9225877.stm

For an artist who plucks his ideas from today's headlines while looking back to the painterly traditions of the past, Tom Hunter is resolute about one thing.

He seldom strays far from the Hackney, east London neighbourhood he calls home.

In the decade since he first came to critical attention, the photographer's E8 patch has continued to yield stories and memories which he retells taking inspiration from tableaux painters and old masters.

An early work depicted a young woman reading an eviction order by the light of a sash window in the manner of a Vermeer interior.

In another - from a collection that became the first photographs ever to be exhibited at London's National Gallery - he transposed Velazquez's Rokeby Venus to an East End strip club.

Hunter designs his work to be puzzling and provocative.

The winner of 1998's Kobal Photographic Portrait Award describes his large-format images as bleak but 'familiar and fair, and broadly resonant with today's society'.

For his new show his goal once again is to put the spotlight on the residents of his home turf.

As he unveils the results of 18 months of endeavour, he told BBC London about the stories behind some of his new images.

This photograph of my friend's daughter, Roisin, was taken on the edge of Hackney Marshes on the banks of the river Lea. Roisin is underneath a bridge and is looking up as if in hiding from a seeker.

She is also holding on to a giant, triffid-like plant that could inhabit a South American jungle. The plant is hogweed or angelica archangelia in Latin; it is phototoxic which, in terms of my work, is apt.

The image was inspired by the painting Roger Delivering Angelica by Jean Auguste Dominique Ingres (1819), which depicts a young woman chained to rocks and being rescued from a dragon by a knight in shining armour astride a Hippogriff.

Although I owe the composition and sense of wonder to Ingres, I feel this contemporary female doesn't need a knight to defend her or dragon to threaten her. Her battles are her own, within her changing adolescent body, and her demons and saviours are from her own imagination.

I wanted to create the sense of an everyday epic, which in this case began with a story of boating adventures overheard in a local pub.

The title refers to a place where the river Lea cuts into Hackney, and this is a journey from the banks of the Hackney Marsh along the river Styx of Greek mythology.

The image shows another friend of mine pulling a boat through a sea of green algae while a woman reclines in her ferry on her epic adventure.

The ferryman, Charon in the original myth, has become Captain Willard, the Martin Sheen character in the film Apocalypse Now, pulling The Raft of the Medusa by Théodore Géricault (1888), from the great marsh to the centre of the underworld.

This is journey's end in the subterranean underworld of Hades and it shows the 'mole man' of Hackney laid out in a hell of his own making.

This infamous character spent years burrowing beneath his house until his forced eviction by Hackney council.

I met him several times and was once invited to view his kingdom: the subterranean world he created caused buses to change their routes in case they were dragged down beneath the tarmac, as Odysseus' fleet of ships was pulled under the waves by Poseidon after his conquest of Troy.

Sadly the mole man passed away this year, so the work becomes an epitaph to a great life. The composition comes from the painting The Fall of the Rebel Angels by Luca Giordano (1666), which I think speaks for itself.

Tom Hunter: Unheralded Stories is at Purdy Hicks Gallery, Bankside SE1 to 15 January 2011; a new film commission A Palace for Us by Tom Hunter can be seen at the Serpentine Gallery's Sackler Centre of Arts Education from 8 December to 20 January 2011.

Tom Hunter at the Serpentine Gallery

^{A Palace for Us}

8 December 2010 – 20 January 2011

http://www.serpentinegallery.org/2009/01/the_skills_exchange_project.html

^{The Serpentine Gallery, in collaboration with Age Concern Hackney, launches a major new film commission by London-based artist Tom Hunter. The film is produced as part of the Serpentine’s ongoing Skills Exchange project, and is the result of a long-term residency that Hunter spent on the Woodberry Down Estate in Hackney, East London. A Palace for Us documents 50 years of life of the estate through the testimonies of residents who have lived there since it was first built.} 

^{Constructed as a response to the wreckage of World War II bombing, the Woodberry Down Estate was begun in 1946 and completed in 1962, at which time it was heralded as an ‘estate of the future’. The 57 housing blocks on the estate provided 2,500 homes for people living in impoverished accommodation in the area.}

^{The film includes first-person accounts and flashbacks to three defining moments in the estate’s history. Beginning with the bombing of Stoke Newington in 1944, it encompasses residents’ memories of the 1950s, when the estate was a lively social space for young people, and then moves on to the 1960s, depicting the first generation of children born on the estate scrumping apples on its grounds. The film ends in the present day; the estate’s older residents are currently playing an important role in shaping the future of Woodberry Down as it undergoes a major regeneration project.}

^{The film is part of the Serpentine Gallery’s Skills Exchange project, in which artists, designers and architects work in collaboration with older people, care workers, young people and activists to exchange skills and develop ideas for social and architectural change.} 

^{Skills Exchange begins with the premise that people in the later stages of life possess many skills, insights, memories and ideas that are not only useful but vital to our understanding of, and planning for, the future. Whether they document the transformation of a neighbourhood or a transitional period in life, Skills Exchange projects take place at moments in which change is imminent – occasions when older people are often marginalised and excluded.}

^{A Palace for Us is the second film project by Hunter, who is well known for his photographic works which reference painterly traditions in depicting the lives and histories of London’s East End. The sensitivity of the production reflects Hunter’s in-depth knowledge of the area and its residents.}

Tom Hunter's work features in issuse 52 of Portfolio magazine out now

http://www.portfoliocatalogue.com/52/index.php

_{Prayer Places, Tom Hunter’s luminous pin-hole photographs of church interiors, continue the artist’s long-term project in the London borough of Hackney.}

Tom Hunter interview in The British Journal of Photography

http://www.bjp-online.com/british-journal-of-photography/interview/1932196/global-act-local

A Tom Hunter interview by  Diane Smyth is featured in the October isuse of the BJP, Think Global, Act Local. The interview wil go online in November.

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.

Tom Hunter to be awarded Honorary Fellowship by RPS

THE ROYAL PHOTOGRAPHIC SOCIETY ANNUAL AWARDS 2010

Honorary Fellowships go to fine art photographer Sian Bonnell; gallery director and curator Keith Cavanagh; Tom Hunter, the first photographer to have a solo show at the National Gallery; documentary photographer Ken Lennox; John Reardon, for his portraits of famous chefs; and pioneering colourist Stephen Shore.

http://www.rps.org/annual-awards

The Royal Photographic Society was founded in 1853, to promote the art and science of photography, a mission it continues to this day, in the UK and, through its overseas membership, worldwide. Membership of The Society is open to everyone interested in photography, amateur or professional, artist or scientist. The Royal Photographic Society is a Registered Charity, No. 1107831.
For press images and further information, contact Jo Macdonald, Awards Manager, 01225 325721, jo@rps.org

Tom Hunter Photographic art work on display at the National Gallery.

Tom Hunter's photograph 'Murder, Two Men Wanted', from the series 'Living in Hell and Other Stories', is on perment display in the National Gallery London.

The Art work can be found outside the Sainsbury Wing Theatre at the National Gallery, Trafalgar Square, London.

This is the only Photographic art work on display at the National Gallery and was kindley donated by the Michael G. Wilson Photography Collection.

'The Ghetto' goes back on display at the Museum of London

The photographic 3d model of the squatted streets of Ellingfort road and London Lane in Hackney goes back on display at the new Galleries of Modern London.

Opening on the 28th of May 2010

http://www.museumoflondon.org.uk/English/

Tom Hunter is featured in the Dutch documentery, 'Views on Vermeer'

Here is the link to the 60min film by Dutch film maker Koos De Wilt, featuring 12 stories by Tom Hunter, Tracey Chievalier, Chuch Close, Alain De Botton, Philip-Lorca diCorcia and others.

All English speakers are in English with Dutch sub-titles.

http://cultuurgids.avro.nl/front/detailkunst.html?item=561d392ab277345b480cda808eba86ef

More than three hundred years ago Johannes Vermeer (1632-1675) left us a small oeuvre of less than fourty paintings. In our day and age the power of his work is more profound than ever. Why do his paintings look so contemporarty? How did he influence current culture opinion leaders and effect our common sense of beauty?

'Views on Vermeer' unravels the mysterious modernity and beauty of he work of a once almost forgotten old master. It's a cinematic search that examines and unravels Vermeer's presence in the work os today's filmmakers. photographers, artists, authors and art historians.

Tom Hunter in The British Journal of Photography 23/12/09

http://www.bjp-online.com/public/showPage.html?page=872210

Go local!

Whether it was terrorism or financial collapse, the crises we faced this decade took on worldwide proportions. Photographers have responded with projects on globalisation but, says Paul Wombell, there's also a counter trend towards the local, which defies the logic of international homogenisation

Anchor and hope, 2009 © Tom Hunter

Thoroughly modern mothers: artists reimagine the Christmas nativity scene (9 pictures) guardian.co.uk home

http://www.guardian.co.uk/artanddesign/gallery/2009/dec/14/artists-christmas-nativity-scenes?picture=356878557

Thoroughly modern mothers: artists reimagine the Christmas nativity scene 

6 / 9

Tom Hunter
'What is a nativity scene about? When I first thought about it, I thought of a school playground, of camels and kings. But then I realised it’s actually about a young homeless family, and their struggle to find a place to bring up their children. My photograph is of Leyila, a young refugee from Somalia, and her eight-week-old baby, Kymora. I photographed Leyila and Kymora in their living room, basing the image around Caravaggio’s painting The Nativity with St Francis and St Lawrence. Caravaggio used ordinary people as models, which I find very inspiring. I used an old Tungsten light, which takes about 15 minutes just to warm up, to give the photograph that “Caravaggio light”, and to create a contrast between the cold blue light from outside, and the stark reality of Leyila’s flat. But what I wanted to show above all is the beauty of the simple connection between a mother and her child'

Photograph: Tom Hunter

Tom Hunter print sale at the National Gallery London

Click here for more images

Angels and devils in Hackney at The National Gallery. Tom Hunter at the BBC

http://www.bbc.co.uk/dna/collective/A7771160

It’s a rare thing to see cutting-edge contemporary art in The National Gallery. But that’s what makes photographer Tom Hunter’s latest exhibition, Living In Hell And Other Stories, so ideal.

This exhibition of large-scale photographs is a fascinating play on the frantic sensationalism of the media, particularly in Hunter’s local newspaper, The Hackney Gazette. He parallels the violence, murder, poverty and madness within the pages of the paper with the same themes in the paintings at The National Gallery. He draws on compositions and content from artists like Cranach and Piero di Cosimo to frame stories of strippers on the Hackney Road, people being attacked with swans, and wedding parties turning into brawls. A supposedly innocent cupid in Velasquez’s Rokeby Venus, for example, becomes, in Hunter’s world, a dirty voyeur paying a pound to watch a naked woman.

Tom Hunter recreates Titian's painting Diana and Actaeon

Presenter:

Andrew Graham-Dixon

Transmitted:

25/11/2008

Tom Hunter; 'Living in Hell and Other Stories' at the National Gallery

http://arts.guardian.co.uk/tomhunter

Tom Hunter's best shot, guardian.co.uk, Wednesday 4 November 2009

http://www.guardian.co.uk/artanddesign/2009/nov/04/photography-tom-hunter-best-shot#

University of the Arts London, Celebratory limited edition print, 'Anchor and Hope' 2009

To celebrate the UK's first retrospective exhibition of Tom Hunter's work at the Arts Gallery we have commissioned a limited edition print. This new work draws on American artist Andrew Wyeth's classic painting Christina's World. The special edition of fifty framed A4 prints will be available exclusively at the Arts Gallery priced at £360, to allow Tom’s work to be available to a wider audience.  To purchase a print please email curator Medeia Cohan at m.cohan@arts.ac.uk

Tom Hunter JOINS BEST IN BRITISH ART FOR SHELTER’S HOUSE OF CARDS EXHIBITION

Tom Hunter has joined 51 other British artists and designers to create a unique collection of art inspired by Shelter’s House of Cards campaign.

The housing charity invited Tom to design the Queen of Dimonds card for an exhibition to be held at the Haunch of Venison gallery in London this September.

The exhibition is part of the charity’s House of Cards campaign created by Leo Burnett London, which depicts a collapsing house of cards to highlight the fragility of Britain’s housing market.

Tom’s card will hang alongside others including Rachael Whiteread, Jake and Dino Chapman, Tim Walker, Marc Quinn and Vivian Westwood. Each artist was given a free brief to design the card in any way they liked, with no restrictions on size, shape or medium. The final collection will be a diverse mixture of photography, installation, street art, graphic design, painting and textiles.

To see the full deck on display, visit the exhibition at the Haunch of Venison gallery in London from Thursday 24 – Monday 28 September 2009. Members of the public can place silent bids on the artwork throughout the exhibition, with a selection of the pieces going into a live auction on the closing night.

To find out more about the exhibition and auction visit www.shelterhouseofcards.org.uk.

The Pre-Raphaelites, Nationalmuseum, Stockholm

Tom Hunter will feature in The Pre-Raphaelie exhibition at the National Museum of sweden in Stockholm.

The exhibition shows more than 200 works from this golden age of English art.

26 February 2009–24 May 2009

http://www.nationalmuseum.se/sv/English-startpage/Visit-Nationalmuseum/Exhibitions1/Past-exhibitions-/The-Pre-Raphaelites/More-about-The-Pre-Raphaelites/

The photographer Tom Hunter is one of many modern artists who have been inspired by the Pre-Raphaelites. The work Home from the series Life and death in Hackney from 2000 is a modern interpretation of Arthur Hughes’ Home from Sea from 1862. One thing is obvious. Although 140 years separate the works, they both communicate the same strong feeling of grief and abandonment.

LIVING IN HELL CATALOGUE

Buy Tom Hunter's 'Living In Hell' Exhibition Catalogue
(from the National Gallery)

TOM HUNTER BOOKS ON AMAZON

Here