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Hannah Black: Oof, 2020/2022

For the launch of OCT0, Hannah Black has produced a limited edition print based on her painting Oof, a work that derives from Ed Ruscha’s painting OOF (1962 and reworked in 1963). Oof was first exhibited at Arcadia Missa, London in February 2020. The press release read:

‘On the day of the storming of the Bastille, King Louis XVI wrote a single word in his diary: “rien” (nothing). This has been interpreted as a sign of the aristocracy’s disconnect from the activities of the proletariat. But it is more likely to have been simply a reference to the day’s hunt, in which the king killed nothing. The word “RIEN” appears here as a six-foot painting based on Ed Ruscha’s famous painting “OOF”. Ruscha was part of a movement of artists who played at the boundary of two ideas: that art draws its power from a kind of semantic emptiness, and that this emptiness itself characterises everyday urban life.’

Hannah Black, February 2020