Hannah Knox UK, b. 1978

Hannah Knox (b. 1978) is a British artist whose paintings shift between portrait and still-life, abstraction, and figuration. The garments depicted - like their physical counterpart – retain a time and place, holding a memory within them, as a pocket contains an object. These unbodied shirts and jackets provide a space to project; a recollection, a lover, a holiday, a ‘wish- list’ item from an online shopping basket.

These are paradoxical paintings, they are figurative without a figure, they are folded but flat. The shirts are made of linen, but you can’t wear them, and they have buttons that you can’t undo, recalling Magritte’s 1929 painting The Treachery of Images which stated “Ceci n’est pas une pipe”. 

Varying in scale, from life-size and intimate, to God-like and majestic, Knox’s works switch from generic pre- packaged shirts for disposable office workers, to giant-sized XXXXL proportions, other worldly, and out of reach, speaking of status, desire, and the factory line. 

Knox’s practice uses a variety of materials across painting and installation, her works inhabit a space and perform in some way; changing colour, or revealing 3D images, and others have been made from a selection of fabrics and cloths, or more recently, painted in a way that mimics them. Often referencing Greek myth, (a fascination born from her own Greek heritage) art history and fashion, the works fall from the ceiling, hang out on the floor, or gather themselves up to make a stand-in body in the room.