Portrait of Hitler

Contemporary Magazine
Oct, 2002
Katie Kitamura

“Hugh Mendes’ portrait of Hitler – a bizarre and disconcerting painting -exercises a confrontation with the cataclysmic historical event of the twentieth century. Above an image of Hitler, strangely transposed onto a pastoral landscape, reads: ‘All artists have huge egos in order to believe they have something the world needs to hear or see – or they wouldn’t have the nerve to make it in the first place.’ It is a deliberately provocative reshuffling of history, one that elucidates the distorted skew recollection can give to even the most familiar of events.”