Robert Hodgins; South African 1920-2010; Pretty Boy Floyd
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Notes : In 1980 Robert Hodgins and Jan Neethling mounted one of their printmaking collaboration exhibitions at the Market Theatre Gallery, Johannesburg. Their printmaking experiments centred on a series of screen-printed monotypes, using a photograph of one very notorious American 1930s Depression era gangster, Charles Arthur Floyd, better known as Pretty Boy Floyd (a villain of note, who, despite numerous murders, was well-liked by the American public as a Robin Hood figure. He was later declared America's Public Enemy No 1 by J. Edgar Hoover). The artists found a newspaper article and photograph of this villain and used the image over the Easter weekend of that year as basis for numerous explorations of visual possibilities using a screen-print technique and mixed media to embellish this image. Their Pretty Boy Floyd exhibition subtly referenced the controversial 1964 Andy Warhol exhibition Thirteen Most Wanted Men momentarily installed on the façade of the State Pavilion of the World's Fair in New York of the most dangerous criminals of the time. They had to be summarily covered up soon after the opening. But Warhol (and of course Hodgins) succeeded in valorising the underdog. The title, Pretty Boy Floyd inadvertently echoes the double entendre of same-sex desire suggested in Warhol's exhibition. - Wilhelm van Rensburg Wilhelm van Rensburg (2006) Jan Neethling & Robert Hodgins: Young Men in Garage Trousers: 35 Years of Printmaking. Johannesburg; Art on Paper Gallery publication, pages 3 and 4.
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