KYLE HACKETT
photo by Trish McGee
BIOGRAPHY
Kyle Hackett's paintings explore race, class, and social standing through approaches to self-representation and the constructed image. Hackett (b. Still Pond, MD) earned his MFA from the LeRoy E. Hoffberger School of Painting at Maryland Institute College of Art and his BFA in Fine Arts from the University of Delaware. He has received numerous honors and awards, including the DC Commission on the Arts and Humanities Artist Fellowship, the Civil Society Institute Fellowship at the Vermont Studio Center Residency, the Ruth Katzman Scholarship at The League Residency in New York, and Best in Show at the 2014 Bethesda Painting Awards Exhibition. His work has been featured in publications such as New American Paintings, The Washington Post, HuffPost, Aesthetica Magazine (UK) and is published in the British Library.
Hackett received a Mayoral Salute from the City of Baltimore for his solo exhibition "Rate of Contingency." Recent exhibitions include The Ruth Borchard 2025 Self Portrait Prize (UK); The Herbert Smith Freehills 2024 Portrait Award Exhibition at the National Portrait Gallery (London, UK); "Revisit/Reimagine" at the Banneker-Douglass-Tubman Museum (Annapolis, MD) and "Circular Narratives" at Vinegar Projects (Birmingham, AL). Hackett’s work is represented by Goya Contemporary Gallery (Baltimore, MD). His work is part of collections at Ethan Cohen Gallery (New York) the DC Commission on the Arts and Humanities, Capital One Lounge at Washington Dulles International Airport, the Soho House Art Collection, among others. Hackett is Assistant Professor and co-director of the MFA Studio Art Program at American University (Washington, DC).
ARTIST STATEMENT
My work explores race, class, and social standing through approaches to self-representation and the constructed image. Inspired by nineteenth- and twentieth-century portraiture and precarious modes of depiction, I deconstruct ideas of secure identity and fixed painting techniques through subtexts of the staged, self-aware portrait. Referencing contraptions, braces, or postures from early photography that might objectify and hold a sitter in place, I relate image-making, inflection, and fixedness to concepts of double consciousness. A connected body of work involves vanitas still-life paintings created from discarded self-portrait reference photographs. Quickly compressed, twisted, fixed, bound, doubled, and hung, the discarded images take on new forms. Meanwhile, the slower process of making each painting becomes a living record and reflection on the initial need to discard the reference. Within this process, my work combines the power dynamic and politic of the picture plane.
I examine how authenticity, self-referential source materials and painting methods can articulate systems of identity, representation, and contemporary power structures within and against the conventions of historical genres, such as portrait painting. I highlight how constructing images can construct new relations to serve as a framework for institutional and personal identity-making. Often using indirect glazing to layer an image, I consider how content exists in between spaces, subjects, and beneath painted surfaces. How can slowing down the viewing process challenge the conditions between the image, surface, and material? At the same time, how can this reveal insights into the painter's psychological state and the painting? By emphasizing conflicts between inner and outer, I hope to foster simultaneous ways of being understood beyond position and as human.