Hugo Wilson's work explores issues of faith and belief and the associated structures of power. Wilson's interests are wide-ranging and encompass science, religion and culture, systems of classification, history and memory. Addressing such diverse subjects, Wilson's work enacts an investigative process in which the outcome is by no means certain. The work forms a series of open-ended questions and correspondingly provisional answers.
Read MoreWilson works across a range of media including painting, drawing, sculpture and printmaking. His classical training is evident in his extraordinary technical facility as well as in his reverence for the masters of the Western artistic canon. His work suggests both a devotion to and subversion of this tradition.
Wilson's interest in mutability and instability is manifested in recent paintings and sculptures that take elements from European old master paintings and classical sculpture, and subject them to a process of transformation. In the finished works reconfigured elements from the originals hover at the edge of legibility whilst new possibilities for meaning emerge.
Wilson's recent solo exhibitions include Project B, Milan (2013) and Mihai Nicodim Gallery, Los Angeles (2012). He was included in Nightfall: New Tendencies in Figurative Painting at the MODEM Centre for Modern and Contemporary Art, Debrecen, Hungary (2012) and the Busan Biennial (2010). Wilson's work is in private and public collections internationally, including the New York Public Library, the Deutsche Bank Collection and the Fondazione Memmo in Rome. In October 2013 Wilson was featured as one of just six 'rising stars' in European art by the Wall Street Journal.
