Hoffmann + Maler + Wallenberg is delighted to announce Sacred Chivalry, the gallery’s first solo exhibition featuring artworks by UK artist Joseph Dupré (born 1987, London). The show includes eighteen ceramic pieces and one tapestry, all made in 2023. Dupré’s practice centers primarily on ceramics but also ventures into painting, drawing, printmaking, and weaving.

Dupré’s materiality emphasizes a sense of legacy. His use of Delft blue recalls sixteenth-century Dutch pottery and encourages his objects to be viewed in terms of centuries or millennia rather than moments. This new exhibition tackles the artist’s classical influences, namely medieval art and illuminated manuscripts, and celebrates feudal art’s often clumsy depictions of larger-than-life subjects.

Dupré’s pieces render warring knights and sophisticated royalty in sentimental terms, emphasizing these legends’ generational disconnect with the twenty-first century. The artist achieves the vibrant finish by hand-building and modeling his porcelain creations and painting each work before firing with a combination of clay slips, underglazes, glazes, and lusters in a process that takes several weeks to a few months to complete.

Sacred Chivalry’s subjects are inspired by the artist’s lifelong fascination with medieval legends, including Lancelot of the Lake and King Arthur. The exhibition’s title nods to the moral code by which knights were expected to live, one that emphasized courtesy, valor, piety, and loyalty. Dupré focuses his depictions on the moments of inner contemplation between battles, as in Lancelot du Lac Pilgrim Flask, where the expression on Lancelot’s face is that of a despondent young man, alone and twisted up in emotional turmoil. By showing his hero in a solitary moment without weapons or opponents, the artist emphasizes that heroism is far from simple and remains a notion that continues to elude and frustrate, even centuries later.

Dupre’s works are modern relics in their shrinking of their subjects from the exalted to the handheld. They are reminders of the inherently ephemeral nature of life, which must be entombed in another material to live on after us, and of our daily triumphs, which may be comparatively mundane relative to those of the Knights of the Round Table, but are still worth celebrating and enshrining.

Joseph Dupré studied medicine at the University of Manchester; he currently lives in East Sussex, where he divides his time between a GP clinic and his art studio.