Exhibition Catalog

Locke embellishes his sculptures with details drawn from six objects in The Met collection. Their selection is personal but never arbitrary: 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. Some appear repeatedly, as with the sea monster from Domenico Guidi’s 

 (1694), whose gaping mouth at the base of each sculpture might symbolize the ravenous structures of colonialism and capitalism. The handles on 

, the two works flanking the main doors, reference a 

 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 

 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 protective, which implicate the viewer in Locke’s mis-en-scene, recalling similarly disembodied eyes found in ancient and medieval votive offerings.

 carved in the Phoenician style dominates the center of 

. Found in an Assyrian royal building at Nimrud, the statuette had been stored with other ivory furniture and decorative objects sent as tribute or collected as booty during military campaigns. This work, which represents an individual offering animals and animal skins, was part of an ensemble of six foreign tribute bearers. 

 features a heraldic design reminiscent of a coat of arms—the head of a young boy framed by two sets of sabers. The 

, assembled from objects associated with multiple rulers and retrofitted in 1876 for the investiture of the Ottoman sultan Murad V, analogizes Locke’s own creative process. The young boy is from a 

 of uncertain use and meaning. By virtue of his hybridized appearance, which bears traces of different cultures, the boy signals exchange between the Hellenistic world and Western Asia in the first century B.C., especially at the eastern borders of the kingdoms of Commagene and Armenia. Moreover, as the fruit of early twentieth-century archaeology in Egypt, where the work is said to have been discovered either near the Suez Canal or in Alexandria, this work reflects the complex history of European artistic and geopolitical interests in the region.

In Locke’s hands, the fragments reclaimed from The Met collection form a transnational, transhistorical puzzle that evokes tales—all grounded in fact—of trade, conflict, and conquest. In keeping with his larger subject, Locke has also deliberately built deception and uncertainty into his commission: the outermost sculptures, for instance, 

, are meant to seem damaged, as if they had fallen victim to acts of violence and desecration, a particularly potent connotation given Locke’s juxtaposition of Guidi’s sea monster with purposefully anonymized references to African and Ancient American masks. All of the sculptures, moreover, are but reliefs—facades—propped up at the back by stainless steel braces. Here Locke gestures not only to The Met’s own facade, and to the facade designed by Philip Johnson for 1001 Fifth Avenue directly across the street, which is, like Locke’s trophies, buttressed from behind by struts, but also to the “false fronts” erected by property owners in 1970s Guyana, where Locke was raised. Like these precedents, 

 is a mask that hides and deflects, performs and impersonates. It is not what it appears.

Dialogues with The Met Collection

Exterior Facade

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Trophy 3

Trophy 2

Trophy 1

Trophy 4

Andromeda and the Sea Monster

Goblet

Flintlock Blunderbuss

Figure of a man with an oryx, a monkey, and a leopard skin

Bronze statuette of a boy in Eastern dress

Saber with Scabbard

M&C Spex 2022 Hew Locke

 is the third in a series of commissions for The Met’s historic facade. Borrowing the format of trophies—emblems of competition and victory—Hew Locke has created four sculptures that reflect on the exercise and representation of power. These works feature details inspired by objects in The Met collection, many rendered unfamiliar through appropriation, fragmentation, and recombination. Relying on an aesthetic of excess and artifice, 

 leverages the relationship between guilt and gold across 3,000 years of art history, exploring the routes objects travel over time as well as the material and symbolic values that accrues to them as they change hands.

Hew Locke was born in Edinburgh, Scotland, in 1959 and raised in Guyana, a multiracial, multicultural nation in South America that was formed in the crucible of indigeneity, European colonialism, the African slave trade, and Indian indentureship. He and his family arrived in Guyana in 1966, just as the country was establishing its independence from British rule. Locke returned to the United Kingdom in 1980, travelling alongside a wave of immigrants from Britain’s current and former colonies in the Caribbean. He completed a BA in Fine Art at Falmouth School of Art in 1988 and an MA in Sculpture at the Royal College of Art in 1994. He has resided full time in London since 1989.

The exhibition is made possible by the Jane and Robert Carroll Fund, Art Mentor Foundation Lucerne, and Cynthia Hazen Polsky and Leon B. Polsky.

The Facade Commission: Hew Locke, *Gilt*

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The Facade Commission: Hew Locke, Gilt

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