Join us for a talk exploring the life and work of Donald Locke, with his son artist Hew Locke OBE RA, and Robert Leckie, guest curator of Resistant Forms and Director of Gasworks, London.
£3, booking essential
Second Floor Galleries
About the speakers:
Robert Leckie is Director of Gasworks, a leading non-profit arts organisation based in south London. He was previously Director of Spike Island in Bristol from 2018 to 2024 and Curator at Gasworks from 2011 to 2018. Over the past fifteen years, Robert has curated major solo and survey exhibitions by artists including Pacita Abad (with Pio Abad), Lawrence Abu Hamdan, Peggy Ahwesh (with Erika Balsom), Candice Lin, Rosemary Mayer, and Donald Rodney (with Nicole Yip).
Robert has co-edited and contributed to publications including Donald Locke: Resistant Forms (Spike Island, Ikon Gallery and Camden Art Centre, 2025), Donald Rodney: A Reader (Whitechapel Gallery, 2025), Rosemary Mayer: Ways of Attaching (König, 2023), Candice Lin: Pigs and Poison (Mousse Publishing, 2023), Peggy Ahwesh: Vision Machines (Mousse Publishing, 2021), and Sidsel Meineche Hansen: SECOND SEX WAR (Paraguay Press, 2019). He was also a jury member for the 2022 Turner Prize.
Hew Locke is a Guyanese-British sculptor and contemporary artist. Born in Edinburgh in 1959, he spent his formative years (1966-80) in Guyana before returning to the UK with an ambition to study art. He completed a BA at Falmouth School of Art in 1988 and an MA in sculpture at the Royal College of Art in 1994.
Locke explores the visual language of power, how different nations fashion their identities through visual symbols of authority, and how these representations are altered by the passage of time. These explorations have led Locke to a wide range of subject matters, imagery and media, assembling sources across time and space in his deeply layered artworks.
In March 2022 his Duveen Hall Commission for Tate Britain, The Procession, was unveiled, as was his work Gilt as the Façade Commission for The Metropolitan Museum and Art Gallery in New York.
Solo shows have included Here’s the Thing at the Ikon Gallery, Birmingham (2019), The Tourists on board HMS Belfast, The Imperial War Museum, London (2015), What have we here? at the British Museum (2024) and Passages at the Yale Centre for British Art, New Haven USA (2025). In June 2023 he was awarded an OBE in the King’s Birthday Honours for services to art.
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