HUGH HAYDEN: HUGHMANITY

LISSON GALLERY is pleased to present 'Hughmanity', an exhibition by artist Hugh Hayden, on view from September 27 to November 01, 2025.

September 27 – November 01, 2025

A dining table engulfed in flames, a lifeboat lined with thorns, a child’s dress fashioned from tree bark—these are among the striking new works featured in Hughmanity, Hugh Hayden’s first return to London since his 2020 debut with the gallery was abruptly closed just days after opening due to COVID-19 restrictions. Now staging his seventh show with Lisson Gallery, the Texan-born artist expands upon his ongoing investigation of congregation, passage and assimilation through the transformation of familiar cultural symbols into allegories of community, rupture, and belief. These new works, meticulously crafted from trees through a series of techniques like felling, milling, carving, and laminating, extend Hayden’s sculptural language, while the introduction of painted surfaces signals a significant new expanding element within his practice.

At the center of Hughmanity is The Last Supper (2025), a stretched table encircled by flames and rendered unreachable. Dining tables, he reminds us, are not only sites of joy and communion but also of fraught family gatherings, unspoken grief, or absence. The flames that rise from its surface also echo religious and art historical precedents, from Leonardo da Vinci’s composition of the same name to Ed Ruscha’s Burning Gas Station. Suspended nearby, 13 cast-bronze skillets embedded with African masks extends the allegory. First conceived as “melting pots” in his previous London exhibition, American Food, these diasporic skillets now embody Jesus and his disciples. Their specialized forms and polished surfaces suggest both individuality, purpose and collectivity. Together, the fiery table and its floating counterpart form a pairing that questions the conditions under which communion, whether spiritual, social or cultural, can occur.

Tension between refuge and danger shapes The Good Samaritan (2025), a dinghy lined with thorns carved from Christmas-tree branches that point inward toward the boat’s center. Partially navigable with its two oars left clear of protrusions and a small smooth space remaining at its core, the boat hovers between promise and threat. The vessel recalls Hayden’s earlier Gulf Stream (2022), inspired by Winslow Homer’s painting of a lone fisherman adrift at sea. Here, though, the narrative shifts toward an allegory of possible survival despite treacherous conditions.