Gerard Hemsworth: Hidden Agenda
June 21, 2009, to January 10, 2010
Although his paintings are seemingly unproblematic, simple and innocent, upon closer examination the works of British artist Gerard Hemsworth become confrontational, disconcerting, and provocative in a slightly uncomfortable way.
Beginning on June 21, 2009, The Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum is presenting fifteen works comprising Hemsworth’s first solo museum exhibition in the United States. His long career has been devoted to a careful consideration of painting’s options, meanings, and tactics. Hemsworth’s visual language is comprised of line drawings of cartoon–like images, open spaces, and flat muted colors; representational works that have the familiarity of both modernist paintings and storybook pictures. He has developed a project that has allowed him to undermine the seriousness of high modernist art and cultural values, while at the same time providing a space that questions their possibility.
Writers have compared Hemsworth’s work to the 19th–century romantic landscape painter Casper–David Friedrich, as well as to the contemporary sculptor best known for his giant reproductions of banal objects in stainless steel, Jeff Koons. The absurdity of this gulf indicates the ability of Hemsworth’s paintings to straddle the sublime and the ridiculous. His paintings are both insistent and subversive, questioning the values and assumptions that the viewer brings to the work—the hidden agenda for which we cannot account.
Hidden Agenda will be on view through January 3, 2010. The public were invited to Meet the Artist and to celebrate the exhibition on June 21, and on June 19 Gerard Hemsworth gave a private gallery talk about his newly installed exhibition.
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Gerard Hemsworth: Hidden Agenda
Gerard Hemsworth, Hidden Agenda, 2008
Courtesy of Galerie Michael Janssen, Berlin
Gerard Hemsworth: Hidden Agenda
Gerard Hemsworth, Intruder, 2008
Courtesy of the artist
Gerard Hemsworth: Hidden Agenda
Gerard Hemsworth, Means To An End, 2006
Courtesy of the artist
The Artist:
Gerard Hemsworth has exhibited internationally since the 1970s. He lives and works in London, where he is the Professor of Fine Art at Goldsmiths, University of London.
Museum funding provided, in part, by the Connecticut Commission on Culture & Tourism, the National Endowment for the Arts, and the Institute of Museum and Library Services. Special thanks to the opening weekend event sponsors: Collyer Catering, Ridgefield Magazine, HSBC Bank, WSHU Public Radio, and the Harry Zarin Fund.
Gerard Hemsworth, I Told You Not to, 2009
Courtesy of the artist
