- 16
Henry Hudson
bidding is closed
Description
- Henry Hudson
- Plate 4, The Exhibition In New York
- varnished plasticine on board
- 183 by 245cm.; 72 by 96 1/2 in.
- Executed in 2014.
Catalogue Note
At The Exhibition in New York Young Sen is shown at the private view of a group show he has been invited to be part of. Also part of the exhibition are works by Laurence Owen, Cecily Hampton, Ed Fornieles, Austin Lee and an Eddie Peake performance piece. Sen’s own work, a close up of a Lynn Chadwick book, hangs at the far left of the room, and is in fact a detail from Plate 6 – The After Party in The Rise and Fall of Young Sen, anticipating what will come.
The gallery view is attended by a variety of art world characters, a few young students look at the Austin Lee canvas at the far right, and a serious looking gentleman seems to be lecturing his female companion about the intellectual aspects of the show. A group of fashionable people have gathered and are taking a selfie; they are wearing Phillip Colbert’s creations, which are themselves full of quotes from iconic names in art history. This group includes satirist Nimrod Kamer, and model Harriet Verney, who are in fact friends of Hudson. In a wheelchair just in front of this group sits Yayoi Kusama, who appears to be wearing clothes inspired by her own obsessive and iconic dots works.
At the forefront of the composition is Young Sen, now confidently standing and talking to Roberta Weinstein, a rich New York heiress who owns the gallery and who will end up being his wife. Roberta’s gallery is a pet project, created in a whim to occupy her time, but represents success for Young Sen, as his work is now being shown in one of the main cities in the art world. Here, Young Sen has abandoned the idea of being a doctor, the hopes and dreams he left his homeland with, and has been seduced into a new, luxurious lifestyle. The Exhibition in New York completes the link with Hogarth’s The Levee, where Tom Rakewell is seen at his new lodgings enjoying his new acquisitions and services he can afford with the money he has inherited. The composition for the present panel borrows further from Hogarth’s work, as the main characters stand in the same position as the bride and groom at The Marriage.
The gallery view is attended by a variety of art world characters, a few young students look at the Austin Lee canvas at the far right, and a serious looking gentleman seems to be lecturing his female companion about the intellectual aspects of the show. A group of fashionable people have gathered and are taking a selfie; they are wearing Phillip Colbert’s creations, which are themselves full of quotes from iconic names in art history. This group includes satirist Nimrod Kamer, and model Harriet Verney, who are in fact friends of Hudson. In a wheelchair just in front of this group sits Yayoi Kusama, who appears to be wearing clothes inspired by her own obsessive and iconic dots works.
At the forefront of the composition is Young Sen, now confidently standing and talking to Roberta Weinstein, a rich New York heiress who owns the gallery and who will end up being his wife. Roberta’s gallery is a pet project, created in a whim to occupy her time, but represents success for Young Sen, as his work is now being shown in one of the main cities in the art world. Here, Young Sen has abandoned the idea of being a doctor, the hopes and dreams he left his homeland with, and has been seduced into a new, luxurious lifestyle. The Exhibition in New York completes the link with Hogarth’s The Levee, where Tom Rakewell is seen at his new lodgings enjoying his new acquisitions and services he can afford with the money he has inherited. The composition for the present panel borrows further from Hogarth’s work, as the main characters stand in the same position as the bride and groom at The Marriage.
Aware of the fact he needs a visa to stay in the United States, Young Sen contemplates nervously an arrest that is taking place at the gallery. This scene already augurs Sen’s problematic near future and eventual downfall.