Hugh Mendes' Website

Waking the dead.
'Death from Above' Sartorial Contemporary Art

Extra, extra! Read all about it. There's nothing like the sensationalism of the news. This exhibition brings together clippings from old broadsheets and incredibly detailed paintings of these snippets. And the thing that ties them all together, apart from that contemporaneousness, is that they're all about death.

The obituary pages get special attention in this visual graveyard. (And Mendes in particular has a thing for the layout and imagery in The Independent.) There are many images of the famous - Saddam Hussein, Kurt Vonnegut, Anna Nicole Smith, James Brown - all touching on the strange relationship between history and death. There are also pieces from other news fragments. In particular, a rather interesting painting of an artwork (Mark Wallinger's current Tate installation) of a painting by Banksy. It's like a visual tongue-twister.

What doesn't quite come across in reproduction is the skill in the paintings
themselves. Mendes is good with a brush and death becomes him.

Francesca Gavin, BBC Collective, 26 April 07

'Art News'
Three Colts Gallery, Nov - Dec 2004

Although 'Art News' gathered together contemporary artists working with newspaper, it was remarkably free from the anxiety of influence. The newspaper figured here not as ephemera or found object, but rather as medium, with artists remaining within the page layout or using it as (literal) material. Melanie Jackson fashioned a grey spindly cactus out of newspaper pulp, while Amikam Toren pulped stock quotes and bad news from Iraq to create a blurry Ad Reinhardt. Alternate newspaper universes abounded: Kim Rugg rearranged the letters of the Guardian so that the paragraphs were long alphabets rather than meaningful sentences. In Alex Hamilton's wonderful renderings of front pages, penned hieroglyphs stood in place of text, replacing anonymous authority with idiosyncratic doodles. Eva Weinmayr painted Formula One racing-car paint onto newsprint, literalising the idea of an 'opposite' page by foregrounding what newspapers are not: beautiful, iridescent, a-functional.

The assumed contrast between the visual and the textual was best illustrated by Martin Creed, who played the two off each other to question the association of text with information and form with abstraction. Creed showed 'A' through 'I' of a series commissioned by The Independent, which printed a single letter each day in the front section. The work transformed the basic building block of newspaper information - its letters - into pure shapes, and shapes whose meaning derived only from their place in the pre-formed series.

The show's curator, Hugh Mendes, diverged from the dominant focus on medium to approach content with Levinian concerns of mediation and appropriation, with Richter-like paintings of obituaries of intellectual dignitaries: Jacques Derrida, John Coplans, Henri Cartier-Bresson. The painted scraps of newspaper, depicted with torn edges and a shadow on the canvas, set the obituaries' subjects at three levels of remove - in the photograph, the photograph's reprint and the painted representation.

Given the art world's recent saturation with political messages, it was surprising that the show withheld any critique of the newspapers place in the public sphere or systems of power. Depending on how you felt about the last few festivals and biennials, 'Art News' was either a relief or a strangely averted opportunity.

Melissa Gronlund, 'contemporary', Issue 70

The Times
July 23, 2003

How painter, Hugh Mendes, turns news into art
By Kate Quill

As a painter, Hugh Mendes has enjoyed a typically chequered career. He abandoned art as a young man and was prompted to return to it just a few years ago after a painful bereavement. Now aged 47, and back at his easel, his instinct has paid off. This former teacher has won the main prize at Fresh Art, the talent-spotting show for emerging artists which took over Islington’s Business Design Centre last weekend.
The bereavement is significant: Mendes paints still lifes in the venerable tradition of the vanitas, which uses commonplace objects to remind us of the fragile and transitory nature of life. But rather than hourglasses or flowers on the brink of decay, Mendes uses newspapers to make his point. He collects bundles of clippings from the day’s papers, combines them in playful or uneasy juxtapositions of headline and photograph, and records them with the skill of a trompe l’oeil painter.

It’s a simple idea, and it’s perfect for the genre. The newspaper, that man-made butterfly that ends its brief but glorious day-long life in the bin, the gutter, or floating piecemeal through a Tube tunnel, is offered up for the kind of sober contemplation that it rarely, if ever, enjoys.

The nuts and bolts of the medium are all put on Mendes’s dissecting table: typography, design, photojournalism, headlines, even the wafer-thin, muddy quality of newsprint itself. Elements that are put together at breakneck speed by armies of journalists — and consumed equally quickly — are brought to an arresting, deadline-free halt.

“Newspapers offer us strikingly beautiful images that people rarely stop to look at properly,” says Mendes. “I love typography, and am constantly struck by the high standard of photojournalism in the papers.”

Mendes’s big idea was launched, appropriately, on the day the biggest story of our lives broke. With unsettling foresight, he exhibited a diptych that juxtaposed a clipping of George Bush with another from an Islamic paper that he found blowing around the street near his East London home — a photo of a turbanned man aiming a gun. He placed the man pointing the gun directly at Bush. Mendes decided to exhibit the diptych on his MA graduation day: September 11, 2001. As New York entered a maelstrom, he realised that the turbanned figure was Osama bin Laden.

Shaken by this experience, it nevertheless spurred him on. His output is prolific — he paints about one canvas a week. He has his favourite papers and sections — the obituary pages of The Independent hold a particular vanitas-inspired appeal for him.

There is a notable streak of the unruly, provocative editor in Mendes. Thus a headline quoting the Pope’s dismay at the “culture of death” in the West is coupled with a photo-news item about an exhibition of electric chairs in the US. He is also a stern critic of the medium he examines so painstakingly. He is irritated by endless redesigns and groans at the preponderance of san serif fonts. “Heavy, horrible to paint, dead,” he says. He prefers the more delicate serifs, such as Century and our own Times Classic, for their “elegance, their emotional quality”.

A painter in an editor’s chair? What a thought. You certainly won’t look at your morning paper in quite the same way again. Mendes does what good painters — and good newspapers — strive to do: question the way we see things.

"Hugh Mendes' portrait of Hitler - a bizarre and disconcerting painting -exercises a confrontation with the cataclysmic historical event of the twentieth century. Above an image of Hitler, strangely transposed onto a pastoral landscape, reads: 'All artists have huge egos in order to believe they have something the world needs to hear or see - or they wouldn't have the nerve to make it in the first place.' It is a deliberately provocative reshuffling of history, one that elucidates the distorted skew recollection can give to even the most familiar of events."

Katie Kitamura, Contemporary, Oct '02

reviews
Waking the dead. 'Death from Above' Sartorial Contemporary Art Extra, extra! Read all about it. There's nothing like the sensationalism of the news. This exhibition brings together clippings from old broadsheets and incredibly detailed paintings of these snippets. And the thing that ties them all together, apart from that contemporaneousness, is that they're all about death. The obituary pages get special attention in this visual graveyard. (And Mendes in particular has a thing for the layout and imagery in The Independent.) There are many images of the famous - Saddam Hussein, Kurt Vonnegut, Anna Nicole Smith, James Brown - all touching on the strange relationship between history and death. There are also pieces from other news fragments. In particular, a rather interesting painting of an artwork (Mark Wallinger's current Tate installation) of a painting by Banksy. It's like a visual tongue-twister. What doesn't quite come across in reproduction is the skill in the paintings themselves. Mendes is good with a brush and death becomes him. Francesca Gavin, BBC Collective, 26 April 07
'Art News' Three Colts Gallery, Nov - Dec 2004 Although 'Art News' gathered together contemporary artists working with newspaper, it was remarkably free from the anxiety of influence. The newspaper figured here not as ephemera or found object, but rather as medium, with artists remaining within the page layout or using it as (literal) material. Melanie Jackson fashioned a grey spindly cactus out of newspaper pulp, while Amikam Toren pulped stock quotes and bad news from Iraq to create a blurry Ad Reinhardt. Alternate newspaper universes abounded: Kim Rugg rearranged the letters of the Guardian so that the paragraphs were long alphabets rather than meaningful sentences. In Alex Hamilton's wonderful renderings of front pages, penned hieroglyphs stood in place of text, replacing anonymous authority with idiosyncratic doodles. Eva Weinmayr painted Formula One racing-car paint onto newsprint, literalising the idea of an 'opposite' page by foregrounding what newspapers are not: beautiful, iridescent, a-functional. The assumed contrast between the visual and the textual was best illustrated by Martin Creed, who played the two off each other to question the association of text with information and form with abstraction. Creed showed 'A' through 'I' of a series commissioned by The Independent, which printed a single letter each day in the front section. The work transformed the basic building block of newspaper information - its letters - into pure shapes, and shapes whose meaning derived only from their place in the pre-formed series. The show's curator, Hugh Mendes, diverged from the dominant focus on medium to approach content with Levinian concerns of mediation and appropriation, with Richter-like paintings of obituaries of intellectual dignitaries: Jacques Derrida, John Coplans, Henri Cartier-Bresson. The painted scraps of newspaper, depicted with torn edges and a shadow on the canvas, set the obituaries' subjects at three levels of remove - in the photograph, the photograph's reprint and the painted representation. Given the art world's recent saturation with political messages, it was surprising that the show withheld any critique of the newspapers place in the public sphere or systems of power. Depending on how you felt about the last few festivals and biennials, 'Art News' was either a relief or a strangely averted opportunity. Melissa Gronlund, 'contemporary', Issue 70
The Times July 23, 2003 How painter, Hugh Mendes, turns news into art By Kate Quill As a painter, Hugh Mendes has enjoyed a typically chequered career. He abandoned art as a young man and was prompted to return to it just a few years ago after a painful bereavement. Now aged 47, and back at his easel, his instinct has paid off. This former teacher has won the main prize at Fresh Art, the talent-spotting show for emerging artists which took over Islington’s Business Design Centre last weekend. The bereavement is significant: Mendes paints still lifes in the venerable tradition of the vanitas, which uses commonplace objects to remind us of the fragile and transitory nature of life. But rather than hourglasses or flowers on the brink of decay, Mendes uses newspapers to make his point. He collects bundles of clippings from the day’s papers, combines them in playful or uneasy juxtapositions of headline and photograph, and records them with the skill of a trompe l’oeil painter. It’s a simple idea, and it’s perfect for the genre. The newspaper, that man-made butterfly that ends its brief but glorious day-long life in the bin, the gutter, or floating piecemeal through a Tube tunnel, is offered up for the kind of sober contemplation that it rarely, if ever, enjoys. The nuts and bolts of the medium are all put on Mendes’s dissecting table: typography, design, photojournalism, headlines, even the wafer-thin, muddy quality of newsprint itself. Elements that are put together at breakneck speed by armies of journalists — and consumed equally quickly — are brought to an arresting, deadline-free halt. “Newspapers offer us strikingly beautiful images that people rarely stop to look at properly,” says Mendes. “I love typography, and am constantly struck by the high standard of photojournalism in the papers.” Mendes’s big idea was launched, appropriately, on the day the biggest story of our lives broke. With unsettling foresight, he exhibited a diptych that juxtaposed a clipping of George Bush with another from an Islamic paper that he found blowing around the street near his East London home — a photo of a turbanned man aiming a gun. He placed the man pointing the gun directly at Bush. Mendes decided to exhibit the diptych on his MA graduation day: September 11, 2001. As New York entered a maelstrom, he realised that the turbanned figure was Osama bin Laden. Shaken by this experience, it nevertheless spurred him on. His output is prolific — he paints about one canvas a week. He has his favourite papers and sections — the obituary pages of The Independent hold a particular vanitas-inspired appeal for him. There is a notable streak of the unruly, provocative editor in Mendes. Thus a headline quoting the Pope’s dismay at the “culture of death” in the West is coupled with a photo-news item about an exhibition of electric chairs in the US. He is also a stern critic of the medium he examines so painstakingly. He is irritated by endless redesigns and groans at the preponderance of san serif fonts. “Heavy, horrible to paint, dead,” he says. He prefers the more delicate serifs, such as Century and our own Times Classic, for their “elegance, their emotional quality”. A painter in an editor’s chair? What a thought. You certainly won’t look at your morning paper in quite the same way again. Mendes does what good painters — and good newspapers — strive to do: question the way we see things.
"Hugh Mendes' portrait of Hitler - a bizarre and disconcerting painting -exercises a confrontation with the cataclysmic historical event of the twentieth century. Above an image of Hitler, strangely transposed onto a pastoral landscape, reads: 'All artists have huge egos in order to believe they have something the world needs to hear or see - or they wouldn't have the nerve to make it in the first place.' It is a deliberately provocative reshuffling of history, one that elucidates the distorted skew recollection can give to even the most familiar of events." Katie Kitamura, Contemporary, Oct '02