Exhibition Dates: September 15, 2022–May 22, 2023
Exhibition Location: The Met Fifth Avenue Facade
The acclaimed Guyanese-British artist Hew Locke has created four new sculptures for The Met Fifth Avenue's facade niches, marking the third in a series of site-specific commissions for the exterior of the Museum. Fashioned into the shape of trophies—emblems of competition and victory—and covered with a thin layer of gilding, the works, collectively titled Gilt, reflect on the exercise and representation of power. Featuring details inspired by objects in The Met collection, Gilt leverages the relationship between guilt and gold (gilt) across 3,000 years of art history, exploring the routes objects travel over time, as well as the material and symbolic values that accrue to them as they change hands.
The Facade Commission: Hew Locke, Gilt is on view through May 22, 2023.
The exhibition is made possible by the Jane and Robert Carroll Fund,
Art Mentor Foundation Lucerne, and Cynthia Hazen Polsky and Leon B. Polsky.
“Hew Locke creates powerful, dynamic and beautiful work that deals with serious subject matter such as race, power, migration, and greed. The four trophies he has created for the facade reference The Met collection while also offering new narratives and untold stories across histories, geographies, and artistic styles,” commented Max Hollein, Marina Kellen French Director of The Met. “This annual commission is incredibly important to the Museum, as the works that occupy The Met’s facade niches serve as public ambassadors for the institution, welcoming visitors and passersby alike. We know that all will be dazzled by Locke’s work.”
Rooted in his study of both art history and political history, Locke’s practice is premised on appropriation, juxtaposition, and recombination. Assemblage, in which disparate materials from disparate places and times collide, is key to his work. As with Gilt, Locke’s primary materials are readymade: he relies heavily on an inventory of found images and symbols, from trophies and coats of arms to works of art, warships, public sculptures and so on. The two largest sculptures that flank the Museum’s main entrance, Trophy 2 and Trophy 3, feature details drawn from six objects in the Museum’s collection. And they themselves are reliefs—facades—propped up at the back by stainless steel braces. The outermost sculptures, Trophy 1 and Trophy 4, each appear to be fragments of a trophy and are meant to seem damaged, as if they have fallen victim to acts of violence and desecration.
Each work is implicated by virtue of its form, symbolism, or original function in networks of exchange and relations of power. In myriad ways, each of these objects expresses, conveys, and symbolizes authority. Appearing repeatedly is the sea monster from Domenico Guidi’s Andromeda and the Sea Monster (1694), whose gaping mouth at the base of each sculpture could symbolize the ravenous structures of colonialism and capitalism. The handles on Trophy 2 and Trophy 3, reference a goblet possibly made with war booty seized by the Avars, a nomadic tribe of the Eurasian steppe, or with gold tribute offered to them by the Byzantine emperor. The sculpted tiger crowning each handle appears on a late eighteenth-century flintlock owned by Tipu Sultan—the self-proclaimed Tiger of Mysore—and later taken to Europe as a spoil of war, after Tipu was killed by the British in 1799, the culmination of a long conflict over Britain’s imperial ambitions in India. At the tops of these centermost trophies are clusters of eyes, possibly omniscient, possibly warding off the evil eye, which implicate the viewer in Locke’s mis-en-scene, recalling similarly disembodied eyes found in ancient and medieval votive offerings.
About the Artist
Hew Locke was born in Edinburgh, Scotland, in 1959 and raised in Guyana, a Caribbean nation in South America, between 1966 and 1980. His 15 years in Guyana—a diverse, multicultural, multiracial society formed in the crucible of indigeneity, European colonialism, the African slave trade, and Indian indentureship—began the same time that British rule over the country came to an end. Locke returned to the United Kingdom in 1980, at a time when a successive wave of immigrants relocated, mostly to London, from Britain’s current and former colonies in the Caribbean. He completed a BA in Fine Art at Falmouth University in 1988 and an MA in Sculpture at the Royal College of Art in 1994. He has resided full time in London since then.
In 2019, Locke’s comprehensive solo exhibition, Here’s the Thing, opened at Ikon Gallery, Birmingham, and subsequently toured to Kemper Museum of Contemporary Art, Kansas City, and Colby College Museum of Art, Maine. Locke’s works have been included in The Folkestone Triennial (2011); the Diaspora Pavillion, part of the 57th Venice Biennale (2017); Prospect New Orleans Contemporary Art Biennial (2014); and Hangzhou Triennial of Fiber Art (2016). In 2010, his piece Sikandar was short-listed for the Fourth Plinth, Trafalgar Square. In 2015, Locke was commissioned by Surrey County Council and National Trust to create The Jurors, a public artwork at Runnymede commemorating the 800th anniversary of the sealing of the Magna Carta, and in 2016 the Public Monuments and Sculpture Association nominated him for its Marsh Award for Excellence in Public Sculpture. His work was also recently included in the major exhibition Artist and Empire at Tate Britain (2015–16) and Life Between Islands: Caribbean-British Art, 1950s–Now. Locke’s 2022 Tate Britain Commission, The Procession, recently opened to critical acclaim.
Locke's work is represented in the collections of many arts institutions, including The Metropolitan Museum of Art, where sculptures from his series The Wine Dark Sea (2016) were featured in the 2019 installation Home is a Foreign Place: Recent Acquisitions in Context at The Met Breuer; Tate Gallery; the Arts Council of England; the Victoria & Albert Museum Drawing Collection; Kunsthalle Bremen, Germany; the British Museum; the Brooklyn Museum; and Perez Art Museum Miami, among many others.
The Facade Commission: Hew Locke, Gilt is conceived by the artist in consultation with Sheena Wagstaff, former Leonard A. Lauder Chair of Modern and Contemporary Art, and Kelly Baum, Cynthia Hazen Polsky and Leon Polsky Curator of Contemporary Art, and the Acting Curator in Charge of Modern and Contemporary Art at The Met. Baum is also serving as the commission's curator.
The Facade Commission is part of a new series of contemporary commissions at The Met in which the Museum invites artists to create new works of art, establishing a dialogue between the artist's practice, The Met collection, the physical Museum, and The Met's audiences. The Facade Commission was inaugurated in September 2019 with Wangechi Mutu's The NewOnes, will free Us, followed by Carol Bove's The séances aren’t helping.
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September 15, 2022
Contact: Alexandra Kozlakowski
Communications@metmuseum.org
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