Hannah Knox UK, b. 1978
130 x 150 cm
The garments depicted in Hannah Knox's paintings - 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.