EDUCATION
BA Fine Art (1st Class Honours), Goldsmiths, University of London (2017 - 2020)
Foundation Diploma Fine Art, (Pass with distinction) Central Saint Martins (2016 - 2017)
AWARDS
Winner of the The Hamad Butt Memorial Prize: 2019
awarded to a student of exceptional promise
PUBLICATIONS & EXHIBITIONS
2023: HEMISPHERES, Alice Black Gallery
2023: Death Dissensus, Deleuzine, Vol 2 She Dogs
2023: Volume 1, Incoming Evidence
2023: Bye To Your Corpse, Pilot Press, Responses to Untitled (Eye with Comet by Paul Thek)
2022: Centrifugal Horse, Today is a Beautiful Day Presents Deep Meaningful Conversation, (Co-curator, Producer and Exhibiting artist/ writer) Collaborative research project, group show and supplemantary publication championing 9 award winning artists and writers from Glasgow School of Art and Goldsmiths UoL.
2021: Cadmium Red, Tactical Before, Sticky Fingers, Fragile, disorienting, breakable, naive, hesitant, loving, lusting, leaking, trembling, terrifying, fucking Nocturnal
2021: The Future Toddlers of My Friends Clamber Over Me
and Affectionately Sprinkle Grass Onto My Shoulders, Coven Magazine, Berlin, Year Of The Bog
2021: Love Compound, Oofle Dust, George Mackay and Freya Mavors presentation of new writing.
2021: Goldsmiths Degree Show
2019: Group Show 1. The Flying Dutchman
2018: Up and Coming. Central Saint Martins
Hugo Hagger (He/him) is an artist and writer living in East London, he is the winner of the 2019 Hamad Butt Prize. Hugo’s writing sets out to challenge, question, and parody how language is used in the production of a socialised, hegemonic meaning. He is interested in the politics of legibility and in offsetting a poetics against or within the confessional, and vernacular. In this sense public and private interpolate and consolidate. Queerness is explored through a rejection of conventional linearity and absorption, while small personal failures and moments of self sabotage are admitted to alongside language that measures its own limits, its own failures and insufficiency.
Features of Hugo’s writing practice are reproduced in his drawing, sculpture, and performing practice; obfuscation, repurposing, repetition, and transformation. Although they are ideas he forcibly resolves or problematises outside of language, he consciously maps out a visual syntax that feels substitutive of a written one.