The Baltimore Museum of Art acquires work by Hew Locke

Hales is thrilled to announce that the Baltimore Museum of Art has acquired Hew Locke's 2023 work Souvenir 16 (Queen Victoria).

 

Locke explores the languages of colonial and post-colonial power, how different cultures fashion their identities through visual symbols of authority, and how these representations are altered by the passage of time. These explorations have led Locke to a wide range of subject matters, imagery and media, assembling sources across time and space in his deeply layered artworks.

 

In Locke's series, Souvenirs, busts are encrusted with handmade and found materials. The statues are made of Parian - a material that imitates marble, invented for the Great Exhibition in the 1850s by Stoke-on-Trent company, Copeland. The development of Parian was revelatory in the mass production of statuary, as the works could be made with a mould, making them accessible for the public to buy (all the busts are originals from the 1800s or made from the original mould). Here, Locke has taken the popular and now rarefied souvenirs and adorned the heads with jewels, crowns, crests, skulls, military medals and metal masks.

 

This acquisition is courtesy of Baltimore Museum of Art, Art Fund established with exchange funds from Gifts of Dr. and Mrs. Edgar F. Berman, Equitable Bank, N.A., Geoffrey Gates, Sandra O. Moose, National Endowment for the Arts, Lawrence Rubin, Phillip M. Stern, and Alan J. Zakon.