Prada IT Bag 2014

CJ HENDRY born 1988

Prada IT Bag 2014

ink on paper
149.0 x 231.5 cm; 154.0 x 237.5 cm (framed)
signed lower right: CJ Hendry

Provenance:
Acquired from the artist, private collection, Queensland, 2014
Menzies, Sydney, 2021 [private sale]
Private collection, Sydney

Estimate: $80000 - 100000

Result Hammer: $80000

To march with purpose down Collins Street, past Prada and Cartier, past Fendi and Louis Vuitton, past Bulgari towards the corner where the line for Gucci blends into the line for artisanal croissants, it is clear that each element of this Melbourne scene – the ornate glass displays, the lines, the anxiety, the carefully guarded thresholds – forms a necessary part of the theatre. The goods are arranged with artful precision inside the stores, the bags to be carried on one’s side, their logos facing out, for a stroll through CBD streets towards a state gallery that routinely features collaborations with the most prestigious high fashion brands of the world.

It equally requires no stretch of the imagination to see how CJ Hendry, the young Australian now based in New York, luxuriates in this theatre of visual abundance. Hendry’s work, an energetic devotion to the hyperreal tradition, is the result of a close, almost tactile engagement with a world of objects, form, and colour. Here we see a large ink rendering of a Prada bag, crumpled and frozen in time, each curve and shade brought into being with meticulous, devotional, almost fanatical care. And like the Wonka chocolate bar physically present on a television screen, the bag is presented with a real sense of multidimensionality; that we can reach out to feel the image as well as see it. 

Hendry is open about her creative debt to Robert Longo, the graphic virtuoso, musician and filmmaker from Brooklyn who came to prominence in the 1980s with a series called Men in the Cities, charcoal drawings of well-dressed men and women in contorted poses. In 2014, the same year this Prada image came into existence, Longo reflected on the physicality of drawing – the interview was with none other than Keanu Reeves, who Longo directed in the 1995 film Johnny Mnemonic – in a way that captures some of Hendry’s method as well. ‘Every aspect of the image,’ he said, ‘is interesting to me to dissect and understand.’  

This level of detail, and focus, takes time, and Hendry spends many hours crafting each piece to perfection. It is immersive, meditative, drawn out: she herself has reflected on the act of drawing, how it brings her closer to the image at hand. ‘My drawing practice is really intimate. It’s beautiful but it’s really labour-intensive and it’s also really lonely.’1

There is tension on the surface in this kind of art. It finds a certain comfort with the symbols of fashion, where glamour, poise and refinement come into contact with the everyday. With her Prada bag, suspended in space, Hendry takes a quotidian, functional item and asks us to lean in, to look more closely, to focus like she does on each line, curve and shade.

But let’s not overthink things. First impressions matter, especially for an artist so closely identified with the endless, relentless scrolling of social media, specifically Instagram, the global empire built on fleeting visual appetisers. As her followers know well, Hendry has bypassed the traditional gallery system to reach such artistic prominence. She has used Instagram as a way of connecting directly with her buyers - and only recently, having established herself and asserted herself as an artist, does she even entertain the subject of gallery representation, though one must assume that any partnerships would be entered very much on her terms.

Hendry acknowledges her role as a performer alongside the business of art, and that means she is in the business of demystifying the process too. She resists the need to overburden the viewer with profundities before they have even had a chance to spend time with her work:

For the majority of people, they can understand what I'm doing and I think that’s fine. So I think that’s maybe why it’s been somewhat successful because it’s not this crazy hard-to-understand work. It’s really not. It’s relatively simple on the surface. But if you choose to dive further, you’ll understand ... it’s far more complex. I don’t push the complexity on people, and I think that’s what I find, not unusual but frustrating with a lot of art and artists. It’s like they force the conceptual ... why push that? Just push the great work. And if people are even interested, they’ll look further.2

Footnotes

1. Cascone, S., ‘‘It Allows Me to Be a Little Bit Wild’: CJ Hendry on What Inspired Her to Build a Colossal Adult Indoor Playground in Brooklyn’, Artnet, 13 April 2013, https://news.artnet.com/art-world/cj-hendry-plaid-playground-brooklyn-2283812
2. ‘Inside the Studio with CJ Hendry’, Art Ed Radio, The Art of Education University, Iowa, 10 December 2019, https://theartofeducation.edu/podcasts/inside-the-studio-with-cj-hendry-ep-198/#transcript

Ashleigh Wilson
Ashleigh Wilson is the author of Brett Whiteley: Art, Life and the Other Thing (2016), On Artists (2019) and A Year with Wendy Whiteley (2022); and the editor of Transcendence: 50 Years of Unforgettable Moments at the Sydney Opera House (2023)

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