”It was a bright day in April, and the clocks were striking thirteen” as Hugo Farmer’s downed tools and stood back to survey what he’d been chiselling, carving, painting and printing for the last couple of years… THE THIRTEENTH STROKE is exactly what its proverb suggests… 

That understated opening sentence from 1984 sounds so ordinary; so matter of fact… but then it sneaks up on you with a jarring wrongness that sets the tone for Orwell’s dystopia. That sense of history’s breaking point ticking closer and closer; of things falling apart, permeates Hugo Farmer’s new work… The  ‘megaphone-head’ bronzes so prominent in earlier shows are making a comeback, albeit with some provocative new characters – including a Queen dubbing a new Knight with a baseball bat as he ‘takes the knee’ and a boy meddling dangerously with a box of matches. These are voices of protest, designed to disturb and therefore destined for a run-in with the new Police, Crime, Sentencing and Courts Bill, about which John F. Kennedy could have been talking when he said,


“Those who make peaceful revolution impossible will make violent revolution inevitable”


22 April – 16 May 2021
Hoxton Gallery
17 Marlow Workshops
Arnold Circus, Shoreditch,
London E2 7JN

Hugo Farmer is available for interview.
For press contact: Kate McQuaid Email: kate@innerchildpr.co.uk / +44(0)7432 547 446
To book an appointment contact: Kevin Martin Email: hi@hoxtongallery.co.uk

Hugo Farmer’s come a long way in his 45 years – all the way from his Bristol birthplace to the Auroville ashram in India at the age of three, back to Bristol to become a teenage rave aficionado and on to London’s legendary Dragon Bar for the baptism of fire in street art, the wider rave culture and sound engineering that led to his working for some of the most influential artists of our times. 

Variously answering to a bewildering range of ‘job titles’ from artist and sculptor to boat builder, carpenter, sound engineer, producer and set designer. No great surprise, then, that his output’s always been hectically eclectic (heclectic!) – and, despite an indisputably subversive, even anarchic streak, his art is very much ‘hands-on’ – the product of ageless reverence, of a passion for the physicality of his materials and of old-fashioned craftsmanship and sheer graft. 

Those imperiously silent bronzes (The Politician, the Sergeant, the Priest and Ohm Boy) that spoke volumes in his first major solo exhibition back in 2014 were a case in point, along with the way the chips and chunks, savaged splinters and shavings from his carving and carpentry got saved and remade into his series of  ‘wood paintings’ …

Often created in the quiet times while the sun and the resin were slowly setting on other works, these were a rare instance of symmetry and order amid anarchy, their highly finished, tactile, landscape-like topography alive with exuberant colour. Parsimonious yet liberal; chaotic yet ordered; iconoclastic yet committed to the craft of his art, Hugo Farmer then as now delighted in the random. As he said at the time,

‘….these latest paintings are a literal by-product of my carpentry work – using offcuts to create something unique that’s as random as random can be; creating chaos as a by-product of the very ordered process of woodwork! That said, even random has to start and end somewhere – and as with pretty much all art, it’s about the process; about seeing the thing through…’

And half a decade on, Hugo’s latest series of works clearly share the woody DNA of those pieces. Still going againts the grain with their stylised Acid House-era smiley face graphic references they hark right back to where we came in: Hugo’s rave and Dragon Bar days. Created by routing out circles from a wooden ‘canvas’, they’re overlaid with screen-printed, layered and lacquered mesh effects reminiscent of classic Tron-style imagery.

Now back in his birth-city for the last three years, ensconced in enviable style in his wide-beam Dutch barge Bojangles moored in Bristol harbour, one of the most recent in a series of major installation works (in his Madame Two Saws guise for the likes of Greenpeace/Wolfgang Buttress, Moving Units and many others) has been installing himself in a fabulous studio space called St Dunstan’s House (AKA House of Dunce). 

 Converted and run by artists for artists, this beautiful 17th century church building, complete with original stained-glass windows is, with the addition of kindred artistic spirits Sickboy and Grey Jam (and more to come including a recording studio) a ‘broad church’ indeed. 

And it’s an amazingly inspiring working environment for the multi-faceted artist known as Hugo Farmer. Asked how he felt about it, ‘Blessed!’ was the simple and rather appropriate reply.