Review: Tom Hunter’s “Living in Hell and Other Stories” at the National Gallery

Traditionalists often complain of the lack of craft in modern art, yet the photographer Tom Hunter, in his composition and use of light, shows an equivalent level of skill to any “Old Master” with horsehair brush and oils. There is something astonishingly painterly about his work with a lens.

It is thus something of a shock to come suddenly upon his show at the National Gallery. Walking into the Sunley room, your gaze is attracted by the distant prospect – several galleries on – of Van Dyck’s famous giant equestrian portrait of Charles I. Then you look left, to an image that seems equally familiar; a young woman stands holding a letter in the light of a window.

Looking closer, you realise that while you might well have seen it before, this is not the familiar Vermeer painting, but Hunter’s Woman reading a Possession Order, which was modelled on it. Made in 1997, and winner of the Kobal Photographic Portrait Award the following year, it is a highly accessible, yet highly effective, image. Instead of the rich bourgeois setting of the original, this is a dilapidated Hackney room, and beside the woman is not a bundle of richly embroidered cloth but a baby, who looks anxiously at his straight-backed mother, who is carefully holding herself together.

© Courtesy the artist and Jay Jopling/ White Cube, London

This is an apt introduction to Hunter’s latest work, “Living in Hell and Other Stories” in which the photographer has taken headlines from his local paper, and classic paintings that almost every viewer will recognise, then put them together into images that tell not just of a moment, but of an entire individual, and community, life.

Heading into the new work, the viewer is greeted immediately by the shocking Living in Hell, in which a confused-looking old lady looks out from under the merciless glow of a simgle unshaded bulb, surrounded by the scraps of takeaway food and ashtrays. It is only a closer look that reveals the wallpaper behind her, apparently patterned, is actually covered with hundreds of cockroaches, as is everything around her.

What is striking, again and again, is the glowing, luminous quality of light, but it is often shut away, contained and inaccessible, like the hope that is missing from these crippled lives. So in Naked Death Plunge the corpse lies in the cold light of dawn, at the base of a traditional block of council flats; the golden light is trapped within the stairwells. The lit-up flat is perhaps the one from which the man jumped. The image is finished by the deflated football that lies beside the man’s body – so symbolic, yet also, to anyone who knows these estates, so typical.

Much attention for the exhibition has focused on the scenes from the stripper pubs of the East End, and these are effective, if a little obvious, without ever being prurient. The nun clutching the kitsch statue of the Virgin Mary as she admonishes the stripper’s client – the sex worker looks on, her legs akimber and still displaying her wares to the client – is hilarious, her but hardly conducive to more than a simple laugh.

It is in the subtler works, those that more briskly exercise the viewer’s imagination, that are most effective. So in Rat in Bed – modelled on Gaugin’s Spirit of the Dead Watching – a young East Asian woman lies asleep on her bed. There’s a suggestion that she might be a sex worker, in the array of shoes under the window, and the bordello-like decoration of the room, but we can’t be sure.

What we can be sure about are the two mangy-looking rats on the bed, menacing her. One must surely be about to run over her body, and we can almost anticipate her scream. A cat – derelict of its duty – its head hidden, lies asleep on the mat; was it, perhaps, meant to be her guardian angel. If so, no rescue is likely from that quarter.

© Courtesy the artist and Jay Jopling/ White Cube, London

Thus it is that with a single snap of time, Hunter constructs, or rather causes to be constructed, complete, individual narratives in his audience’s minds. Yet, as the interview with the artist that is showing in the exhibition demonstrates, there is much “art” in their construction. So Living in Hell required hundreds of cockroach corpses purchased “on the internet”. (The mind boggles.) I’m not sure, however, that the interview is a positive for the exhibition. Postmodernism demands that the artifice behind the art be unveiled; As a viewer I’d rather just disappear into the apparent reality.

Yet this suggestion aside, what is clear from this exhibition is how well Hunter’s work stands up against all of the great art in the galleries around it. He is both derivative and profoundly original; grounded in fact, yet surfing on flights of fancy. This is art for the 21st century that deserves to survive long beyond it.

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The exhibition continues until March 12. Links: the gallery; a BBC review and interview with the artist; an Observer review.