HUGH HAYDEN

At the center of Hughmanity is The Last Supper (2025), a stretched table encircled by flames and renderedunreachable. Dining tables, he reminds us, are not only sites of joy and communion but also of fraught familygatherings, unspoken grief, or absence. The flames that rise from its surface also echo religious and art historicalprecedents, from Leonardo da Vinci’s composition of the same name to Ed Ruscha’s Burning Gas Station.Suspended nearby, 13 cast-bronze skillets embedded with African masks extends the allegory. First conceived as”melting pots” in his previous London exhibition, American Food, these diasporic skillets now embody Jesus andhis disciples. Their specialized forms and polished surfaces suggest both individuality, purpose and collectivity.Together, the fiery table and its floating counterpart form a pairing that questions the conditions under whichcommunion, whether spiritual, social or cultural, can occur.

Tension between refuge and danger shapes The Good Samaritan (2025), a dinghy lined with thorns carved fromChristmas-tree branches that point inward toward the boat’s center. Partially navigable with its two oars left clearof protrusions and a small smooth space remaining at its core, the boat hovers between promise and threat. Thevessel recalls Hayden’s earlier Gulf Stream (2022), inspired by Winslow Homer’s painting of a lone fishermanadrift at sea. Here, though, the narrative shifts toward an allegory of possible survival despite treacherousconditions.

Elsewhere, painted wooden flags punctured by cigarettes, pencils or fragment patriotic imagery into narratives ofanxiety, erasure, and defiance. One flag adorned with fifty wooden cigarettes in place of stars, presents a portraitof a nation under strain. Another, Gone with the Wind (2025), is studded with erasers seemingly caught in motion.In Medusa (2025), the fifty stars are replaced with carved and painted timber rattlesnakes, their writhing presencecasting the banner as both myth and menace. These works collapse the line between patriotism and critique,underscoring how a nation’s or a person’s identity can be rewritten through conflict, erasure, and resistance.

Nearby, a sharply tailored blazer lined with thorns recalls the traditions of English suiting and emphasizes howsuch markers of status can also torture. Other works, including Pinocchia (2025), a bark-covered child’s dresslayered with pink tulle, men’s dress shoes and a set of Mary Jane flats all encased in bark, highlight the tensionbetween blending in and being defined, or even being consumed, by the very structures that promise acceptance.

Taken together, these works lend Hughmanity a spiritual undertone that oscillates between Biblical allegory andcontemporary critique. As in earlier public projects—from Brier Patch (2022), a forest of branched school desksin Madison Square Park, to The End (2025), a skeletal form slowly dissolving into the New England woods—Hayden turns familiar forms into metaphors for entropy, exclusion, and renewal.

Courtesy Lisson Gallery.