The Art-o-rama contemporary art fair in Marseille (France), which opened its 17th edition yesterday in that French town, is shaken a few hours after its opening by a stand exhibiting oil paintings by the British artist Alex Margo Arden in which it depicts moments from the death scene of cinematographer Halyna Hutchins, who was fatally shot in 2021 when a gun in the possession of actor Alec Baldwin went off while filming a movie in the United States.
With around 40 galleries – mostly from Europe, the US and Latin America – the traditional fair, located in an old tobacco factory converted into a cultural complex in the port city in the south of France, is beginning to circulate in the media and networks. for the impressive presentation of the stand of Ginny on Frederick, a London gallery that has decided to bet big by sending a series of works that recreate the episode in which Baldwin, who always claimed that he did not know that the gun was loaded with a bullet In reality, he mortally wounded the cinematographer of Rust, the film he was directing at the time.
The context of these paintings, which depict police cars parked outside the film set, a gun in an evidence box and a lone arm with reddish marks around its shirt sleeve, is made clear by an accompanying text written by the artist , which details the incident. and the subsequent judicial trials.
Prosecutors who carried out the investigation dropped manslaughter charges against Baldwin in April of this year, after Arden finished these paintings. Meanwhile, the trial against the member of the film crew who provided the weapon, Hannah Gutiérrez Reid, who has pleaded not guilty to involuntary manslaughter, is scheduled for later this year.
“I am interested in questions of responsibility, which means having integrated myself, as an artist, into the narrative of this trial by remaking parts of the evidence for public consumption.
This trial was very sensational in the media, and all that coverage inevitably skewed the reception of the facts. Opinions of guilt and justice can be understood as interpretations of multiple people,” Arden said in statements reproduced by the specialized newspaper The Art Newspaper.
Margo Arden is a London-based artist.
Her work is displayed in sculptures, photographs and performances with strong anchoring in gender issues, which she addresses from her position as a trans artist.
According to the publication, Arden does not shy away from the dilemmas that his sample raises and alleges that he was able to represent so much evidence because the police department in charge of collecting evidence in the case decided to upload hundreds of images of the crime scene to a publicly available Google Drive, although The disc was subsequently removed.
To further complicate the idea of responsibility in his work, the artist assured that he hired professional painters to execute these works, “taking them out of his hands.”