Tom Hunter (b. 1965)
Hallowe'en Horror. Trick or Treat Thugs Break Mum's Bones
Lambda print mounted on aluminium
47⅝ x 61in. (121.1 x 155cm.)
Executed in 2003, this work is from an edition of seven

Provenance:
Private Collection, London.

Exhibited:
London, National Gallery, Tom Hunter: Living in Hell and Other Stories, 2005-2006 (another from the edition exhibited; illustrated in colour, p. 27). This exhibition later travelled to Sheffield, The Graves Art Gallery; Arles, Recontres d'Arles and New York, Yancey Richardson.

†λ Please see our Conditions of Sale for definitions of cataloguing symbols.

Specialist Notes:

The raw photography of Tom Hunter takes the formal qualities normally reserved for the large-scale Old Master paintings and appropriates them to reconstruct events which take place every day in London today. Drawn to the dramatically macabre headlines of his local newspaper in the London borough of Hackney, Hunter tells his stories through carefully staged photographs presented on a large scale. ‘in the same way that Thomas Hardy used stories from his local paper The Dorchester Evening Chronicle and wove these into his novels I have worked…to create a contemporary narrative in my photographic work’ (T. Hunter, quoted in The National Gallery, London).

Hallowe’en Horror: Trick or Treat break Mum’s Bones is part of the artist’s Living in Hell and Other Stories series, which was exhibited at the National Gallery, London in 2005. The series came into dialogue with the museum’s celebrated Old Masters collection formed by such illustrious names as Sebastiano del Piombo, Peter Paul Rubens, Michelangelo Caravaggio and Ludovico Carracci. Just like the works by these Old Masters, Hunter presents dramatic subjects staged for dramatic effect, operating at the precipice between reality and fiction in order to explore universal human emotions. Indeed the artist notes that ‘the series examined how artists of their time expressed universal themes through their viewpoints…[and] works to lift the every day into the mythical and forces the viewer to re-evaluate contemporary life and its media representation’ (T. Hunter, quoted in The National Gallery, London).

The title of this work is derived from a story from the Hackney Gazette reporting the violent assault of a woman on her doorstep. Hunter has conceived his photograph in sharp chiaroscuro, the woman on the ground bathed in light as six masked and hooded men stand around her. This, along with Hunter’s use of the traditional compositional framework of a central vanishing point, brings about a strong reverberation of the Renaissance painting tradition. With the figures’ bent heads surrounding the woman curled in the foetal position, the image conveys a sense of foreboding that takes on the qualities of some kind of mysterious and violent ritual. In so doing, Hunter succeeds in using the language of Old Master painting to his own ends, exploiting the gestures and compositions of the past to eloquently capture the stories of our present.

Provenance:
Private Collection, London.

-