The defining quality of any hyperrealist artwork is situated in the degrees to which it deviates from—or falls short of—the object it seeks to reproduce. If a Photorealist painting were indistinguishable from a photograph, there would be nothing to look at, nothing to think about.
The forty roughly foot-tall paintings of brown lumber in British artist John Hodgkinson’s exhibition at House of Seiko are one-to-one scale and are deftly executed so as to perfectly resemble the real thing, though nobody would mistake them for actual pieces of wood. For a start, each narrow painting—mimicking a short slat of planed, knotty softwood—is encased in thin strips of aluminum that partly function as a conventional frame but also recall a Judd-like box. This metal cladding is imprecisely affixed, so when all forty timbers are arranged on end, lined up on a purpose-built shelf that spans one wall of the gallery, the paintings stand at slightly odd angles, like a fence that has seen too many winters. The effect is entrancing: a combination of virtuosic trompe l’oeil, Conceptualist seriality, and cockeyed rusticity.
But why would someone make such a gruelingly repetitive series of paintings? (And they are indeed individual works, titled No. 1, No. 2, No. 3, through No. 40, all 2026, rather than components of a single multipart whole.) Each is unique in size, tone, and pattern, although they might credibly have been sawn from the same species of tree. (The exhibition text identifies them as Douglas fir.) These are objects of contemplation; there is something undeniably meditative about this project, akin to Peter Dreher’s sublime lifework “Tag um Tag guter Tag” (Day by Day, Good Day),1974–2020, in which the German artist painted the same unremarkable glass more than five thousand times. By comparison, Hodgkinson’s project is quite modest and widely differentiated; it is possible to imagine that the series drew to a close only when he was no longer able to make each painting distinct from the rest.
While Dreher might have selected his subject for its vacancy and transparency, Hodgkinson’s bits of wood are dense with resonance. The subject presented itself to the British artist while he was staying at a wild-horse sanctuary on California’s Central Coast, where fences were presumably ubiquitous. As the exhibition’s title, “John in California” suggests, these paintings are totems of autobiography, as well as evidence of anthropological study. Unlike in England, wood is the primary building material in California due to its (former) environmental abundance, seismic resilience, and ease of use. Many of the paintings Hodgkinson produced in London focused on historical architectural facades; in California, the paintings not only depict but almost become sections of raw building material, pregnant with unfulfilled potential.
Almost, but not quite. These paintings betray themselves as oil on linen, rather than knotty Douglas fir, from just a couple of feet away—immaculate simulation isn’t what Hodgkinson seems to be going for. Although this detail is not included in the show’s press release, I was told by the gallerist that most of the paintings do not replicate original pieces of wood but were invented by the artist after intense and sustained research into the patterning of wood grain. That alone seems remarkable, casting this act of making more as a hallucination than a dutiful study. The tendency of the dark knots to resemble animals’ eyes—of horses, perhaps—adds to their trippiness. They are even more Californian because of it.
A version of this article appears in the September 2026 issue of Artforum under the title “John Hodgkinson.”
