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A feature of Jonathan Thomson’s forthcoming Sculpture Exhibition at Karin Weber Gallery Hong Kong, the artist’s third solo show with the gallery, is a striking 2.3 metres tall “Mother and Child” cast in aluminium.

The Mother and Child is one of the great themes in art. It touches on sex, fertility and maternity; childhood, innocence, care, protection and growth; intimacy, warmth, tenderness and love; and on all of the concerns that a parent has for the life of a child. In this work the figures are walking hand in hand, the woman stooped slightly to better assist the child to make her own way in the world, supported and protected but independent and self-assured.

The exhibition also includes a work which more specifically addresses the contemporary issue of gender politics. it is based on a “Herm” – a type of sculpture that originated in ancient Greece that comprises a portrait head of Hermes the god atop a square column that is perfectly flat and unadorned other than a set of male genitals carved in high relief at the appropriate height. In ancient times these works were used to mark the boundaries between things. In his “Hermes and Hermione” Thomson makes male and female versions to explore what happens when people cross the conventional boundaries between gender roles, identities and expectations.

The “Ignudi” are the group of twenty beautifully proportioned male nudes that sit atop the architectural structures that serve to demarcate the major narrative paintings that are the centrepiece of Michelangelo’s Sistine Chapel ceiling. Michelangelo was a supremely gifted painter and his male nudes are painted with incredible realism, bold perspective and intense life. In his “Ignudi Sculpture”, Thomson recreates the poses of all twenty of these figures, but takes them off the ceiling and presents them as fully three-dimensional figures in the round.

About the Artist: 
Jonathan Thomson (Australia, b.1957) is an artist, art historian, critic and curator. He has held senior management positions with the Australia Council for the Arts and the Hong Kong Arts Development Council. Recent exhibitions include ‘Lost, Seduced, Abandoned’, Art Fair Presentation, Fine Art Asia (2022), ‘Second Skin’, Karin Weber Gallery (2021) and ‘Gilded Youth’ Solo Exhibition, Slot Gallery in Sydney, Australia (2019).