Hush

Life and training

HUSH was born in 1973 and works under that single name. He trained for five years at the Newcastle school of art and design, taking a degree in graphic design and illustration, and then left Britain to work in Asia, first in Hong Kong and later in Japan, where he spent time as a toy designer and as an art director. That period gave him a close acquaintance with Japanese visual culture which has shaped everything he has made since. He turned fully to painting once invitations to group exhibitions began to arrive, leaving the design trade behind, and has since exhibited across Europe, the United States, Australia and Asia. He was named in a national newspaper's list of twenty up and coming artists early in that transition.

Layered portraits

The recurring subject is a woman's face, built up as a stencil and then half buried under everything laid on top of it: bands of wheat pasted pattern, sprayed colour, tags and drips, and passages of collage. The imagery is drawn from the geisha and from the female characters of manga, and it is set against ornament that runs from geometric repetition to florals suggesting tapestry or decorated porcelain. In some canvases the pattern stays behind the figure; in others the two dissolve into one another, so that a body seems to sink into the surface it is painted on. The result is deliberately unstable, at once glamorous and a little seedy, and it holds together because the stencil underneath is drawn with real precision. He is generally placed among the more technically accomplished painters to have come out of the street tradition.

Prints and editions

HUSH makes his editions as elaborate screenprints rather than as reproductions, and the technical specification is a large part of what is being sold. Aureole, the sheet the house has offered, is a screenprint of fourteen separate layers, printed with glossy black ultraviolet varnish and metallic silver ink on handmade Somerset Satin cotton paper of three hundred and fifty grams, measuring seventy four by fifty four centimetres, in an edition of one hundred and fifty, each sheet signed and numbered by hand, with a small separate run of artist's proofs. It was issued to mark the close of his solo exhibition at a gallery in Paris. Earlier editions follow the same pattern: Le Buste II was a screenprint of sixteen layers finished with gold or silver leaf in a very small proof run, and Rouge 1 a screenprint of twelve colours with a gloss varnish worked over both the figure and the ground.

What a specialist examines

Because the editions are technically complex, condition and completeness carry real weight. The signature and the edition number should be present and legible in pencil, and the number should agree with any documentation from the publisher or the representing gallery. Several versions of the same image usually exist, distinguished only by the metal leaf used or by whether a sheet is a numbered impression or a proof, so the version needs to be established before any price is discussed: a proof from a run of fifteen is not the same object as one sheet from a run of one hundred and fifty. The varnished and metallic surfaces mark easily and should be examined in raking light for scuffing and handling marks. The artist has also worked with a luxury watch brand and has issued work in digital form, and both categories sit apart from the screenprints in the saleroom. The house has sold Aureole within its estimate range.