Tremors brings together a selection of new works set across a range of different media. Tom Hackney has sourced these from specific historical materials encountered in the process of making, researching and reflecting. The exhibition title is prompted by Bertoldt Brecht’s recollection of a summer playing chess with Walter Benjamin in 1934 in Svendborg, Denmark. As Brecht wrote in 1936 when inviting Benjamin back to stay, ‘the chessboard lies orphaned, and every half hour a tremor of remembrance runs through it: that was when you made your moves’. This body of work addresses the tremors of historical material, considering the staging of different contexts as a reverberating point of exchange.

Tom Hackney regards Tremors as a work in progress. Despite having primarily worked and exhibited with paint, the artist locates his practise outside a conventional understanding of the medium. Hackney regards painting as both a working territory and a vehicle for communication, but does not necessarily define himself as a painter, prioritising the medium’s potential for translation over a more formal engagement with paint itself.

The dynamic between the eye and the mind features prominently in a number of Hackney’s works, particularly through the correspondence between painting and chess. In both arenas the notional idea of the game space is played out, both on the board or painted grid and in the mind. Resulting works marry the enclosed, self‐regulating structures of chess and a precise, deliberately sparing application of paint.

Hackney’s Chess Paintings (2009 – present) use the records of chess games played by Marcel Duchamp in the 1920s to create carefully controlled abstract works. The gesso paintings indicate Hackney’s interest in the idea of inhabiting and reactivating historical material to produce a painted index of pure thought. Recent work replaces the monochrome gesso ground with vivid oil paint following Duchamp’s designs for a colour‐coded chess set. Hackney revisits his photorealist work of 2003‐4, working from a photograph of Brecht and Benjamin playing chess. Photorealism, the painted photograph, becomes a cipher for a wider conversation and is presented as a conduit for formal experiment.

Tom Hackney (b. 1977, UK) lives and works in London. Hackney graduated from Manchester Metropolitan University (BA Fine Art, First Class) in 2000 and Goldsmiths College, University of London (MFA Fine Art) in 2008. Recent solo exhibitions include Eye to the Ground, Room, London (2012), Scenic Wonder, Space, London (2005), Suspended Belief, The Castlefield Gallery, Manchester (2003) and Dream Sequence, Arc Gallery, Manchester (2003). Selected group exhibitions include Essence of Things, Ambacher Contemporary, Munich (2013), Plural, Breese Little at WW Gallery, London (2013), Motion Capture, Regional Cultural Centre, Letterkenny and Glucksman Gallery, Cork, Ireland (2013/12), Double Vision, Lion + Lamb Gallery, London (2012), Curator’s Egg Altera Pars, Anthony Reynolds Gallery, London (2012), Point. Line. Plane., Hannah Barry Gallery, London (2011), The Knight Turns its Head and Laughs, Stephen Lawrence Gallery, London (2011), Summer Exhibition, Royal Academy of Arts, London (2011), Urban Dreams, ROOM, London (2011), Seconds, The Sunday Painter, London (2011), Dark Matter, The Sunday Painter, London (2010) and The Golden Record, The Collection, Lincoln and g39, Cardiff (2009). Hackney was awarded the AHRC Professional Masters Scheme (2006‐8) and received the BOC Emerging Artist Award (2003‐4). Hackney’s work is featured in the collections of Fidelity International, Manchester Art Gallery, The Boc Group and LHM plc and private collections in the UK, Ireland, USA, Switzerland and Germany.

Breese Little Gallery
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