Hew Donald Joseph Locke (born 13 October 1959) is a British

sculptor Sculpture is the branch of the visual arts that operates in three dimensions. Sculpture is the three-dimensional art work which is physically presented in the dimensions of height, width and depth. It is one of the plastic arts. Durable sc ...

and contemporary visual artist based in

Brixton Brixton is an area of South London, part of the London Borough of Lambeth, England. The area is identified in the London Plan as one of 35 major centres in Greater London. Brixton experienced a rapid rise in population during the 19th century ...

London London is the Capital city, capital and List of urban areas in the United Kingdom, largest city of both England and the United Kingdom, with a population of in . London metropolitan area, Its wider metropolitan area is the largest in Wester ...

. In 2000, he won a

Paul Hamlyn Award Paul may refer to: People * Paul (given name), a given name, including a list of people * Paul (surname), a list of people * Paul the Apostle, an apostle who wrote many of the books of the New Testament * Ray Hildebrand, half of the singing duo P ...

and the

EASTinternational EASTinternational, often shortened to EAST, was an annual open-submission exhibition selected by invited guests – artists, critics, museum directors and gallerists – that occurred in Norwich University College of the Arts between July and Au ...

Award. He grew up in

Guyana Guyana, officially the Co-operative Republic of Guyana, is a country on the northern coast of South America, part of the historic British West Indies. entry "Guyana" Georgetown, Guyana, Georgetown is the capital of Guyana and is also the co ...

, but has lived most of his adult life in London. In 2010, he was shortlisted for the Fourth plinth, Trafalgar Square, London. In 2015,

Prince William, Duke of Cambridge William, Prince of Wales (William Arthur Philip Louis; born 21 June 1982), is the heir apparent to the British throne. He is the elder son of King Charles III and Diana, Princess of Wales. William was born during the reign of his pat ...

dedicated Locke's public sculpture '' The Jurors'', commissioned to commemorate 800 years since the signing of

Magna Carta (Medieval Latin for "Great Charter"), sometimes spelled Magna Charta, is a royal charter of rights agreed to by King John of England at Runnymede, near Windsor, on 15 June 1215. First drafted by the Archbishop of Canterbury, Cardin ...

Portrait of Hew Locke by Pam Winfield - 2008

Locke has had several solo exhibitions in the UK and USA, and is regularly included in international exhibitions and

Biennales In the art world, a biennale ( , ; ), is a large-scale international contemporary art exhibition. The term was popularised by the Venice Biennale, which was first held in 1895, but the concept of such a large scale, and intentionally internationa ...

. His works have been acquired by collections such as

Pérez Art Museum Miami Pérez Art Museum Miami (PAMM)—officially known as the Jorge M. Pérez Art Museum of Miami-Dade County—is a contemporary art museum that relocated in 2013 to the Maurice A. Ferré Park in Downtown Miami, Florida. Founded in 1984 as the Cent ...

(PAMM), Florida,

The Tate Tate is an institution that houses, in a network of four art galleries, the United Kingdom's national collection of British art, and international modern and contemporary art. It is not a government institution, but its main sponsor is the UK ...

gallery, London and The

Metropolitan Museum of Art The Metropolitan Museum of Art, colloquially referred to as the Met, is an Encyclopedic museum, encyclopedic art museum in New York City. By floor area, it is the List of largest museums, third-largest museum in the world and the List of larg ...

, New York. In 2016, the

National Portrait Gallery National Portrait Gallery may refer to: * National Portrait Gallery (Australia), in Canberra * National Portrait Gallery (Sweden), in Mariefred *National Portrait Gallery (United States), in Washington, D.C. *National Portrait Gallery, London ...

in London acquired a portrait of Locke by

Nicholas Sinclair Nicholas Sinclair (born 1954) is a British portrait

. In 2022, he became a member of The Royal Academy of Arts. He was appointed

Officer of the Order of the British Empire The Most Excellent Order of the British Empire is a British order of chivalry, rewarding valuable service in a wide range of useful activities. It comprises five classes of awards across both civil and military divisions, the most senior two o ...

(OBE) in the

2023 Birthday Honours The 2023 King's Birthday Honours are appointments by some of the 15 Commonwealth realms of King Charles III to various orders and honours to reward and highlight good works by citizens of those countries. The Birthday Honours are awarded as part ...

for services to art. In 2024, he was awarded an Honorary Doctorate by

Edinburgh University The University of Edinburgh (, ; abbreviated as ''Edin.'' in post-nominals) is a public research university based in Edinburgh, Scotland. Founded by the town council under the authority of a royal charter from King James VI in 1582 and offi ...

Background

Born in

Edinburgh Edinburgh is the capital city of Scotland and one of its 32 Council areas of Scotland, council areas. The city is located in southeast Scotland and is bounded to the north by the Firth of Forth and to the south by the Pentland Hills. Edinburgh ...

Scotland Scotland is a Countries of the United Kingdom, country that is part of the United Kingdom. It contains nearly one-third of the United Kingdom's land area, consisting of the northern part of the island of Great Britain and more than 790 adjac ...

, in 1959, Locke is the eldest son of Guyanese sculptor

Donald Locke Donald Cuthbert Locke (17 September 1930 – 6 December 2010) was a Guyana, Guyanese artist who created drawings, paintings and sculptures in a variety of media. He studied in the United Kingdom, and worked in Guyana and the United Kingdom befor ...

(1930–2010) and British painter Leila Locke (née Chaplin) (1936–1992).Earl, Claudette, "Leila Elizabeth Locke – an appreciation", ''Chronicle Family Magazine'', 19 April 1992. He spent his formative years (1966 to 1980) in

Georgetown, Guyana Georgetown is the capital (political), capital and largest city of Guyana. It is situated in Demerara-Mahaica, region 4, on the Atlantic Ocean coast, at the mouth of the Demerara River. It is nicknamed the "Garden City of the Caribbean." It is ...

, before returning to the UK to study. He received a B.A. Fine Art degree in 1988 from

Falmouth University Falmouth University is a specialist public university for the creative industries based in Falmouth, Cornwall, Falmouth and Penryn, Cornwall, Penryn, Cornwall, England. Founded as Falmouth School of Art in 1902, it was later known as Falmouth C ...

, and an M.A. in Sculpture from the

Royal College of Art The Royal College of Art (RCA) is a public university, public research university in London, United Kingdom, with campuses in South Kensington, Battersea and White City, London, White City. It is the only entirely postgraduate art and design uni ...

, London, in 1994. In 1995 he married curator Indra Khanna.Locke's website
Retrieved 2018.

Work and themes

Prof. Dr. Ingrid von Rosenberg has written: "(Black) Artists who continue to produce work with a critical message, like

Yinka Shonibare Yinka Shonibare (born 9 August 1962), is a British artist living in the United Kingdom. His work explores cultural identity, colonialism and post-colonialism within the contemporary context of globalisation. A hallmark of his art is the bright ...

and Hew Locke, avoid the open confrontation typical of the 1980s and instead use humour and satire, positioning themselves as cultural insiders, rather than excluded outsiders." He has cited architecture ranging from the

Baroque The Baroque ( , , ) is a Western Style (visual arts), style of Baroque architecture, architecture, Baroque music, music, Baroque dance, dance, Baroque painting, painting, Baroque sculpture, sculpture, poetry, and other arts that flourished from ...

Rajput Rājpūt (, from Sanskrit ''rājaputra'' meaning "son of a king"), also called Thākur (), is a large multi-component cluster of castes, kin bodies, and local groups, sharing social status and ideology of genealogical descent originating fro ...

, Islamic, and Caribbean vernacular to Victorian funfairs as influences. Locke uses a wide range of media, makes extensive use of

found objects A found object (a calque from the French ''objet trouvé''), or found art, is art created from undisguised, but often modified, items or products that are not normally considered materials from which art is made, often because they already have ...

, and his recurrent themes include cardboard, royalty, public statues, boats, finance and trade.

Cardboard

Locke has said about misreadings of his work in his early career: "I would make a sculpture and people would think it was made for some festival....It was seen as being from a folk tradition, not as being of its own tradition, true to itself – as art basically...I stopped making work in colour for three years, I just dropped it."Hew Locke in conversation with Richard West, ''Source'' magazine, issue 55, p. 9, Summer 2008. Curator Kris Kuramitsu wrote: "Frustrated by the fact that his biography so heavily over-determines the reading of his work, he created a series of sculptures in which he used cardboard to preemptively package the work for the viewer. This move was revelatory for Locke's practice, as through this material he could metonymically address migration, international economics, globalisation and ideas about personal and cultural protection and projection."''Hew Locke'', The New Art Gallery Walsall, 2005.

Royalty

His ongoing series ''House of Windsor'' consists of portraits of members of the

British royal family The British royal family comprises Charles III and other members of his family. There is no strict legal or formal definition of who is or is not a member, although the Royal Household has issued different lists outlining who is considere ...

. He has said: "People ask me why I'm working on pictures of the royal family....They expect me to be angry, but I don't see the point. If you're going to fight in Iraq, then you're going to fight for Queen and Country. When you hand in your passport, you see that you are in fact a subject of the Queen. My work is a weird kind of acceptance of that situation." "My feelings about the Royal Family are ambivalent. I am simply fascinated by the institution and its relationship to the press and public. My political position is neither republican nor monarchist."Von Rosenberg, Ingrid, "Transformations of Western Icons in Black British Art", ''Journal for the Study of British Culture'', Vol. 15/1, 2008.

Statues

In an interview with Simon Grant, Locke said: "...the legacy of empire is all around us on a daily basis – not just the variety of ethnic backgrounds that we have living in the UK, but the buildings and public statues that you see in cities across the country that came into being out of the economy of empire." Locke often works over photographs of specific statues, covering areas with painted or collaged designs. The press release for his work ''Restoration'' describes "Hew Locke’s embellishment, directly on to the photographic print, interrupts our expectation that the surface of the photographic image should be left pristine. We can only guess at what lies beneath ...It is perhaps the image of ''Colston'' that is most haunting. He is adorned with cowrie shells and other trade beads ... we are made aware of his ... involvement in the uncomfortable truths of corrupt African Kingdoms selling their people ... Locke views this work as an act of 'mindful vandalism', an exploration of these characters who he finds both attractive and repellent." Locke said: "When travelling around Britain, the first things I'm looking for are the statues ... I often think 'why have they got a statue to this person and why to that person?' ... On a purely aesthetic level I often find these historical monuments beautiful and have a genuine respect for their skilled academic sculptors. I have a somewhat schizophrenic response. It is not an anti-military critique, but an investigation into the idea of the Hero, and a meditation on our relationship with monumental public sculpture."

Boats

Ships have been a constant theme in his work throughout his career, ranging from small paintings to installations filling a church nave or an installation across an entire battle ship. A major example of Locke's interest in navigational vessels in visual arts is his 2011 installation ''For Those in Peril on the Sea'', acquired by the

. He has said: "I have a deep personal compulsion to make at least one boat every two years or so. It is part of my personal history, having sailed to and from Guyana to England as a child." Curator Zoe Lukov has written: "Locke offers us a maritime procession – at once celebratory and funereal – that is animated by the sub-marine pulse of history...a synthesis of symbols from intertwined historical and cultural legends and narratives...disparate legacies that surf the waves." Locke described his 2019 mixed-media installation ''Armada'', made up of 45 boat sculptures, as addressing the reality that "today's refugee is tomorrow's citizen".

Finance and trade

Curator Amanda Sanfilippo of Fringe Projects, Miami, wrote that Locke "utilizes share certificates ... to embody the history and global movement of money, power and ownership. Since the financial crash of 2008, Hew Locke has been acquiring original antique share certificates and applying paint to their surfaces. Locke ... often highlights historical and economic cycles, the machinations of global currency and exchange. ... Figures representative of the local population in the areas in which the companies operated are sometimes seen breaking-through. These are silent witnesses, those who paid the most to create the wealth without receiving the benefit...This work... is also a wry acknowledgement of the commodity value of contemporary art." ''Art Daily'' reported that his 2017 work ''Cui Bono'' "refers to the wealth that maritime trade brought to Bremen’s merchants. The search for wealth, violent conquest and a desire for safety are factors that for centuries have driven the global movement of people...(it) is a post-colonial incentive to grapple with Bremen's maritime commercial and colonial history."

Selected solo exhibitions and presentations

* 2000: ''Hemmed In Two'',

The Victoria and Albert Museum The Victoria and Albert Museum (abbreviated V&A) in London is the world's largest museum of applied arts, decorative arts and design, housing a permanent collection of over 2.8 million objects. It was founded in 1852 and named after Queen ...

, London * 2002: ''The Cardboard Palace'', Chisenhale Gallery, London * 2004: ''House of Cards'', Luckman Gallery, California State Uni & Atlanta Contemporary Art Center, USA * 2004: ''King Creole'', installation on facade of

Tate Britain Tate Britain, known from 1897 to 1932 as the National Gallery of British Art and from 1932 to 2000 as the Tate Gallery, is an art museum on Millbank in the City of Westminster in London, England. It is part of the Tate network of galleries in En ...

& at BBC New Media Village, London * 2005: ''Hew Locke'', The New Art Gallery, Walsall * 2006: ''Restoration'', St Thomas the Martyr's Church, Bristol * 2008: ''The Kingdom of the Blind'', Rivington Place, London * 2011: ''For Those in Peril on the Sea'', St. Mary & St. Eanswythe church, Folkestone Triennial * 2015: ''The Tourists'', HMS Belfast, London * 2018: ''Hew Locke: For Those in Peril on the Sea'',

, Florida * 2019: ''Hew Locke; Here's the Thing'', Ikon Gallery, Birmingham,

Kemper Museum of Contemporary Art Kemper Museum of Contemporary Art opened in 1994 in Kansas City, Missouri. With a $5 million annual budget and approximately 75,000 visitors each year, it is Missouri's first and largest contemporary museum. Founders The core of the museum's per ...

in Kansas City &

Colby College Museum of Art The Colby College Museum of Art is an art museum on the campus of Colby College in Waterville, Maine. Founded in 1959 and now comprising five wings, nearly 8,000 works and more than 38,000 square feet of exhibition space, the Colby College Museu ...

in Maine * 2022: ''The Procession'', Duveen Hall Commission, Tate Britain, London * 2022: ''Foreign Exchange'', temporary public sculpture co-inciding with The Commonwealth Games, Birmingham, UK * 2022: ''Gilt'', Facade Commission at

The Metropolitan Museum of Art The Metropolitan Museum of Art, colloquially referred to as the Met, is an encyclopedic art museum in New York City. By floor area, it is the third-largest museum in the world and the largest art museum in the Americas. With 5.36 million v ...

, New York * 2024: ''Hew Locke: The Procession'', ICA Watershed at the

Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston The Institute of Contemporary Art (ICA) is an art museum and exhibition space located in Boston, Massachusetts, United States. The museum was founded as the Boston Museum of Modern Art in 1936. Since then it has gone through multiple name chang ...

, MA * 2024: ''Hew Locke: What have we here?'', British Museum, London * 2019: ''Hew Locke: Passages'',

Yale Center for British Art The Yale Center for British Art at Yale University in central New Haven, Connecticut, houses the largest and most comprehensive collection of British art outside the United Kingdom. The collection of paintings, sculpture, drawings, prints, rare ...

in New Haven,

Wexner Center for the Arts The Wexner Center for the Arts is the Ohio State University's "multidisciplinary, international laboratory for the exploration and advancement of contemporary art." The Wexner Center is a lab and public gallery, but not an art museum, as it doe ...

in Columbus OH & The Museum of Fine Arts in Houston

Monographs

* ''Hew Locke'', Walsall, UK:

The New Art Gallery Walsall The New Art Gallery Walsall is a modern and contemporary art gallery in the town of Walsall, in the West Midlands, England. It was built with £21 million of public funding, including £15.75 million from the UK National Lottery and additiona ...

, 2005, * ''How Do You Want Me?'', Paris, France: Editions Janninck, 2009, * ''Stranger in Paradise'', London, UK: Black Dog, 2011, * ''Here's the Thing'', Birmingham, UK:

Ikon Gallery The Ikon Gallery () is an England, English art gallery, gallery of contemporary art, located in Brindleyplace, Birmingham. It is housed in the Listed building, Grade II listed, neo-Gothic former Oozells Street Board School, designed by John Henr ...

, 2019, * ''Hew Locke: What have we here?'', London, UK:

The British Museum Press The British Museum is a public museum dedicated to human history, art and culture located in the Bloomsbury area of London. Its permanent collection of eight million works is the largest in the world. It documents the story of human culture f ...

, 2024, * ''Hew Locke: Passages'', London, UK:

Yale University Press Yale University Press is the university press of Yale University. It was founded in 1908 by George Parmly Day and Clarence Day, grandsons of Benjamin Day, and became a department of Yale University in 1961, but it remains financially and ope ...

, 2025,

References

External links

* * * , University of Miami
"Hew Locke – 'Let's make something positive' , Tate"
Hew Locke at Tate Britain talks about his piece ''The Procession''.
BP Artists Talk: Hew Locke, in conversation with Marcus Verhagen
at Tate Britain site
BP Artists Talk: Hew Locke, in conversation with Gus Casley-Halford
at Birmingham 2022 Festival {{DEFAULTSORT:Locke, Hew 1959 births Living people 20th-century British sculptors 21st-century British sculptors 21st-century Guyanese painters Academics of Camberwell College of Arts Alumni of Falmouth University Alumni of the Royal College of Art Artists from Edinburgh Black British artists British contemporary artists Guyanese sculptors Officers of the Order of the British Empire People from Georgetown, Guyana Scottish contemporary artists Scottish male sculptors Scottish people of Guyanese descent Scottish sculptors