Join the Guyanese-British artist, Hew Locke, as he presents Hew Locke: Passages, the first comprehensive monograph of an artist renowned for his multimedia explorations of colonial and postcolonial power.

As part of Fane Online’s British Art Legends series, this evening honours Hew’s decades-long career exploring issues of colonialism and its modern socio-political, economic legacies, migration and diaspora, and climate catastrophe, and vulnerability.

From his sumptuous early charcoal drawings influenced by the likes of Velasquez and his plastic sculptures Koh-i-noor (2005) and Veni, Vidi, Vici (The Queen’s Coat of Arms) (2004), to his later sculptures such as the fantastical yet life-like Ambassadors series (2022), Hew’s work deconstructs colonial symbols and art historical canons and reimagines deeply entrenched iconographies of British sovereignty and national identity.

Described as “postcolonial baroque”, Hew’s rich, dense and multi-layered attention to materiality fuses vernacular and formal traditions influenced by his British and Guyanese heritage.

To celebrate the accompanying monograph to his current exhibition, also titled Hew Locke: Passages, currently showing at the Yale Centre for British Art, Hew will be in conversation with writer Hannah Hutchings-Georgiou, to discuss his multimedia practise, his daring and dazzling reimagining of colonial symbols, subjects and stories through sculpture, his carnivalesque and baroque forays into diasporic forms and figures, and his employment of beauty and decoration, colour, and material as political tools.

British Art Legends is a Fane Online series that celebrates visionary artists working in Britain today who challenge conventional narratives around British identity and history.

The ‘stream and book’ package includes a unique ticket for the stream, and a copy of Passages (RRP £75) deliverable to any UK address.
The event will initially be broadcast on 18 December at 6.30pm UK time. It will be available to view up to two weeks after the event has ended and can be accessed Worldwide. If you live in a time zone that does not suit the initial broadcast time you can watch it at any point after the initial showing for two weeks.
If you have any questions, please email [email protected].