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Hugh Mendes

For Mendes the consumption of the material has an aesthetic purpose rather than satisfying a personal desire to be informed. Mendes paints still lifes but rather than a bowel of fruit arranged on a platter or a goblet of wine dripping with condensation, Mendes uses the daily papers as his subject matter. Having a background and training in painting still life, his ability of reproduction appears effortless. With the skills of a trompe l’oeil painter the delicately reproduced Newspaper clippings have the illusion of lifting away from the canvas with a thin fragile quality of weightlessness.

Hugh Mendes Images

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I have been painting images of newspaper clippings for about four years now. They came to prominence in my work following 9/11, the day of my MA graduation, when I showed a painting of Bin Laden pointing a gun at a triumphant George Bush. It had been painted about a month previously in response to his contested election victory. The use of newspaper clippings provides a very flat spatial field, recalls certain trompe l’oile 17th century still life and can deal directly with contemporary issues such as cloning and terrorism. These are contemporary manifestations of the timeless themes of birth and death. Recently I have been working on an ongoing, and never ending, series of obituaries. Obituaries condense a life into a few column inches and a single image – a scrap of newsprint that becomes a heavy token, a memento, even an icon, when rendered in paint.
The act of painting and therefore sustained concentration brings a degree of focus and depth to what otherwise would be fleeting moments in the press.
 

Education

2000 - 2001 MA Painting, City and Guilds of London Art School
1975 - 1978 BA Painting, Chelsea School of Art



Selected Exhibitions

2004 Sartorial Art, London
2004 Three Colts Gallery, London
2001 The Foundry, London
Selected Group Shows
2006 'NLK', Wooster Projects, New York
2006 'Beyong the Grave', Sartorial Art, London
2006 'Jerusalem', Dean Clough Galleries, Halifax
2005 'Fuckin' Brilliant',Tokyo Wonder Site, Tokyo
 

Hugh Mendes