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Hew Locke | Cardboard Palace

Review relating to an exhibition, 2002
Published by: Frieze magazine
Year published: 2002
Number of pages: 1

image of Hew Locke | Cardboard Palace

Favourable review of Hew Locke’s exhibition, Cardboard Palace, at London’s Chisenhale Gallery. The review appeared in Frieze, Issue 70, October 2002, p. 95. The review described Locke’s distinctive work, notably the centrepiece of the exhibition itself: “Swallowing up the gallery space, Hew Locke’s Cardboard Palace (2002) drew on the language of pavilion architecture, to create a vast maze-like installation, with exhilarating results. After entering the structure through one of its archways, you were led into a series of curved bays and alcoves enclosed in semi-darkness beneath a canopy of stars. Backlighting behind large cut-out portraits of Princess Diana and Queen Elizabeth II threw streaks of light and shadow on to the floor.”

Towards the end of the review, Mercer introduced interesting observations about Locke’s practice: “If there is something a little scary in shadows thrown by the royal portraits, there is also compassion in Locke’s approach, as he has shown in a series of drawings entitled ‘The House of Windsor’ (2002). There is an element of surprise too, not at the fact that a contemporary black artist might choose to express himself with such warmth on the subject of the British monarchy, but at the way Locke has implicitly mined the etymology of the ‘grotesque’.”

 

Related people

»  Hew Locke

Born, 1959 in Edinburgh

»  Kobena Mercer

Born, 1960 in Ghana

Related exhibitions

Related venues

»  Chisenhale Gallery

London, United Kingdom