Yorgos Prinos at Hot Wheels, London

Hot Wheels, London

4th October - 9th November 2024

In 2003, a 500lb adult tiger named Ming was discovered living in an apartment in Harlem, New York. The authorities were alerted when its owner presented at A&E and after the medics had not believed his tale about being bitten by his pit bull terrier. Ming was tranquilised by an officer from the NYPD who abseiled down from the roof and fired through the bars of the apartment window. The moment was captured in a dramatic photograph and the story has become part of the rich urban folklore of the city. Ming was removed to an animal sanctuary and lived happily there for another 16 years. He has his own Wikipedia page.

A copy of the photograph – revealing the officer suspended in space – facing off at close range with the wild animal, is pasted to the window of the gallery in Yorgos Prinos’ first solo show here in London. This appropriated image succinctly captures something profound about the experience of contemporary life in the city: the instantaneous consumption of images and the transformation of fact into fictions. It is also an allegory of the power dynamic between the taker of images and the taken.

Prinos typically finds his subjects in public spaces. He has a genius for capturing the 21st century version of the ‘decisive moment’, his composition betrays a familiarity with art history alongside an acute alertness to the psycho-social and socio-economic realities of the present day. Prologue to a Prayer I-IX, 2024, is a series of tightly framed head shots of men. Each is presented with their head bowed, eyes lowered as if in prayer. One registers the differing markers of age, class and ethnicity: the receding hairlines and neat braids, the meticulously slicked back and the side parted. Each man is apparently oblivious to the world around him, locked in a moment of inner contemplation. Except this communion is not with a deity, the hands that are just out of shot are not joined in prayer but cradling a mobile phone. While physically present on the street, these stilled bodies are in all other senses absent, focused on entirely other realities. The men were all photographed in different cities, so bringing them together creates a problematic sense of community when they are so patently isolated from their immediate surroundings as well as from each other. Connection to the rest of humanity is via apps developed expressly to commoditise our relationships.

An earlier work, Nine Young Men, 2015 is contrastingly full of interaction and incident. At its centre are two youths, one with his arm crooked around the other’s neck in a gesture that could be either amorous or coercive. The trapped boy’s fresh face leans away, eyes closed, seeming to resist. The fellow to the left of the pair seems to look down in embarrassment; the chap at the back of the group grimaces and one to the right appears to be about to say something. The interconnectedness of these clean-cut teenagers is palpable; unified by their preppy clothes, the composition is such that the bodies all overlap, yet the central relationship, what amounts to an embrace, remains ambiguous. There is something in the way the light of a sunny New York day falls on the group, highlighting some of the boys and casting others into shadow that gives the image a slightly theatrical quality.
 

The two works Man Touching Left Eye (ring finger) and Man Touching Left Eye (index finger), both 2024, picture Asian men, once again in extreme close-up. Hung on opposite sides of the same wall, they punctuate the exhibition and are an example of Prinos’ fascination for doubling as well as signalling the act of looking as the central subject here. The inky dark print Father and Son, 2022 brings the men’s profiles into alignment so that inevitably one seeks out likenesses in brow, nose and chin.

Finally, in this sparely hung show, Trophy, 2024 sits on the chimney breast – the concave of the bright trophy rhyming visually with the black aperture of the cast iron fireplace. Maybe the image itself is the trophy, wrested from the never-ending narrative flux of the city, skyscrapers reflected perfectly in the polished silver of the bowl. Yorgos Prinos is an incredibly sophisticated image maker, with an ability to get under the skin of contemporary realities in the subtlest of ways.

Caroline Douglas, Director

Yorgos Primos, Prologue to a Prayer, Hot Wheels, London

91 Great Russell Street London, WC1B 3PS, Wednesday to Saturday, 12pm to 6pm