Melbourne-based Lush opens his first UK solo exhibition, You Become What You Hate…, tonight at a warehouse space in London’s Hackney Wick. The show includes installations, sculptures, paintings, sketches, prints, t-shirts and zines. If you enjoy Lush’s deliberately offensive, illustration-style work, it promises to be a fun spectacle: sexually explicit imagery of large-scale vaginas, fornicating unicorns, rainbow-coloured guts, urine and ejaculate, scenes of gratuitous violence, and various pieces based on the theme of ACAB / All Cops Are Bastards. Knowingly biting the hand that feeds him, Lush has also included plenty of dismissive references to the street art and graffiti scenes, including comical digs at the likes of Banksy, Eine, Nick Walker, Dondi, Seen and Cope2. Although clever and consistent with the show’s title, the challenge for these works will be whether they can rise above the status of simply being in-jokes for street art and graffiti enthusiasts.
You Become What You Hate… is located at 117 Wallis Road, Hackney Wick, London E9 5LN. After this evening’s launch, the show will run until Sunday 8 July (opening hours: 11am – 7pm).
Discuss Lush here.
Text and photographs by Patrick Nguyen.
