Luke Edward Hall
The Hunter Hunts in a Pink Mist

‘I am drawing my friends as I see them at my dining table, but I am also drawing the characters that hover at the edges of my dreams: Celtic gods of wild places; ancient hunters and shepherds, the kind we know from classical myths and local folklore. I see my work as a sort of patchwork: alive, mythic, vivid and shrouded.’

-Luke Edward Hall

The Breeder is pleased to present The Hunter Hunts in a Pink Mist, Luke Edward Hall’s second solo exhibition at the gallery which presents new works on paper and paintings furthering the artist’s explorations around existing interests which include but are not limited to Greek mythology, art history, interior design, fashion and antiquity.

The romantic aesthetic of Luke Edward Hall’s works is informed by the past and suffused with various references, from the Bloomsbury Group, who very much believed in blurring the boundary between art and design, to Cecil Beaton with Wes Anderson sense of colour. He regularly draws his friends, acquaintances and imagined characters in a distinctive, fluid style referencing the eccentric lifestyles of the 1920s and ‘30s. Luke Edward Hall is greatly inspired by Jean Cocteau, whose mid-20th-century line drawings conjure the intimacy of romance, while the occupants of some of his more isolated scenes are imbued with the same emotional ambiguities that appear in the work of Patrick Procktor or John Craxton.

His emotionally-charged and aesthetically-decorative work explores love, and masculine tropes. His poetic drawings and paintings vibrate with a bold, lyrical motion, combining classical iconography with the immediacy of the everyday oscillating between mythic narratives and a deeply personal interior space. A painter of people, landscape and still life, Hall’s intimate canvases combine pastel hues with explosive color to render a unique symbolical universe derived from folklore and art history. The results are dreamlike, exploring psychological terrain as well as broader concerns like the vulnerability and pervasive eroticism of the male body. Hall approaches it as a site of vulnerability and eroticism in an attempt to challenge the dominant heteronormative representations and to unite masculine and feminine elements in harmonious compositions.

In this new body of work, Hall takes as a starting point personal experiences and draws inspiration from his surroundings, his home and life in the English countryside where he lives and works with his husband and dog. Alongside his characteristic male protagonists, he introduces here scenes filled with green hills, valleys, full blooming flowers and rivers. The natural environment that surrounds him daily becomes here the backdrop where his open-ended stories unfold.

The works establish their own symbolic universe, mixing personal memory, symbolic archetypes and desire and are informed by a sense of optimism, inviting us to escape in a world of pleasure and hope.

Luke Edward Hall works on a broad range of interests, from interior design and fashion projects to murals and illustration work for books, restaurants and hotels. He has collaborated with a variety of companies and institutions including Burberry, Lanvin, Christie’s, Royal Academy of Arts, Ginori 1735, Svenskt Tenn and Habitat. In 2020 Luke’s first large interior design and art direction project opened in Paris at Hôtel Les Deux Gares: a thirty-eight-bedroom hotel and bistro in the city’s 10th arrondissement. In March 2019 Luke joined the Financial Times as a weekly columnist in FT Weekend, answering readers’ questions on aesthetics, interior design and stylish living. September 2019 saw the release of Luke’s first book, Greco Disco: The Art & Design of Luke Edward Hall, published by teNeues. His second book, A Kind of Magic, will be published by Vendome in October 2022. In February 2022 he launched Chateau Orlando, his own brand for homeware and clothing. In January 2021 The Breeder hosted Hall’s first solo exhibition with the gallery in Athens, titled Figs and Honey and Sailing.