We are delighted to introduce a new artwork to Royal Warwick Square by sculptor Nick Hornby. Titled “Do It All,” it is formed by the profile of Nefertiti, perhaps the most powerful woman in ancient history, and the silhouette of the nearby Albert Memorial. They reflect two of the notable Kensington residents after whom buildings on the site have been named: George Gilbert Scott and Howard Carter, and the postmodern Egyptian-revival Homebase which used to occupy the site.
Hornby’s three-tonne sculpture brings the layering— across many periods—of local and global histories to life: Nefertiti, the Albert Memorial and 1980s postmodern Egyptian revival are all compressed and reflected back in the modern glass facades of the development. ‘I am excited to see the ornamental gothic details of the Albert Memorial juxtaposed with the modernist glass of its environment’, said Hornby. Just as Nefertiti is an allusion to Howard Carter and the Egyptian Homebase, the Albert Memorial evokes its Victorian architect George Gilbert Scott. It is a reminder that the Egyptian revival first happened in the nineteenth century: the Homebase was what Hornby calls ‘Egyptian revival revival, a layering of ancient Egypt, Victorian Britain and 1980s London’. His sculpture samples all these periods, jumping from c.1330BC to 1872 to 2023: ‘the compound is weird and beautiful—sci-fi, but relic too. That hybrid appearance captures the slipperiness of the histories these images, and monuments more generally, project. What interests me is the question of how we relate to these things today: they are present and familiar, but their meanings are forever shifting. The title, Do it all, references that pluralism and instability: it alludes to Homebase but with the name of another DIY chain from the 1980s; it is a deliberate mislabeling’.
Nick Hornby said: ‘The Homebase was an eccentric faux-Egyptian temple to DIY, an activity that is British, like tea-drinking or the Last Night of the Proms. The connection with Homebase intersected brilliantly with the Royal Warwick Square link to Howard Carter. Carter was an Egyptologist and archaeologist: he excavated Tutankhamen, whereas this is a site where an Egyptian-revival building was levelled and buried. That story—an inverted excavation—resonates with my process. In excavation, 3D objects emerge; in my work, that transformation is reversed and instead it is an image that emerges from a 3D form’.
Nick Hornby is one of the leading sculptors of his generation working in Britain today, creating works at the intersection of art history and contemporary technology on both intimate and monumental scales. For more information see www.nickhornby.com
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DO IT ALL (2023)
Nick Hornby (b. 1980)
Bronze
5.7 x m 2.4 x 1.6
Royal Warwick Square, Kensington, W14 8DX