Pasado is an early and deeply personal collection of works that explores Christian Hook's family history and ancestral roots. The title, meaning "Past" in Spanish, reflects his diverse heritage; grandparents from Malta, Italy, Spain, and Ireland, and his desire to understand the people and places that shaped him.
The series features intimate portraits of his relatives, most notably his grandmother Marina, rendered with a raw, unflinching honesty influenced by Lucian Freud. These are not formal portraits but quiet, searching studies of the people closest to him, capturing character, age, and the weight of lived experience with remarkable tenderness. The collection also pays tribute to his grandfather William, whose active lifestyle and physical vitality even in old age left a lasting impression on Hook's youth and his later fascination with anatomy and the human form.
Pasado represents Hook's foundational years as an artist, before his rise to international recognition. The themes that would come to define his career are already present here, the exploration of time and memory, the collision of past and present, the search for what lies beneath the surface of a subject. It is the work of an artist finding his voice, and in retrospect, it set the stage for everything that followed.
2010 · 7 works
Ceremony of the Keys
