Digital
Edition of 3 (plus 1 artist’s proof)
Where Mr. Larson explored the weary grandeur of the pub entrepreneur, Trudi expands Hedge Fund’s ever-evolving thesis into the realm of Hyper-luxury — a portrait of aspiration, reinvention, and terminal optimism rendered in more riotous colours than Fund usually uses.
The subject, “Trudi,” is a tax consultant from Cheltenham who, according to footnotes on the Hedge Fund Foundation’s website, once saved an individual so much tax that she received an award from the tax authorities. The prize was given somewhat begrudgingly and the loophole she had been exploiting was immediately closed. Her identity is fluid and unmistakably symbolic — the apotheosis of the self-branding age. In Hedge Fund’s hands, Trudi is both muse and mechanism, person and platform.
Hedge Fund’s compositional strategy here borrows liberally from the color-field minimalists, the techno-ceremonial stylings of Nam June Paik, and the ego-flattening commercial polish of Sephora’s Q4 lighting schemes. Yet under all the colours surely we can discern a deeply human question being asked: What is the value of persona when it’s indistinguishable from product?
Her hair, an electric shade of mauve hardly found in nature or Pantone, defies both physics and good taste with unapologetic aplomb. The effect is disorienting and magnetic.
In the lower left corner, Hedge Fund’s signature appears, and above it a tiny embedded QR code linking to a now-defunct offshore shell company once involved in importing high value wheelie-bins from the UAE — a typical flourish of oblique autobiography from the artist, who continues to merge aesthetics with finance in a way that renders both indistinct.
Critics at the Builth Wells Digital Pavilion called the piece “simultaneously beautiful and ugly.” Trudi herself, when reached via a contact form embedded in her website offered the following statement:
“I didn’t sit for this portrait. Hedge just said he’d seen me once in a Tesco car park and that was enough. It’s a wonderful piece, I just wish I owned it!”
Trudi the Tax Consultant is currently on loan to the West London Institute of Interdisciplinary Futures, displayed in a dimly lit alcove with a placard that reads simply: “Trudi by H.Fund”.
