Photography by Matt Marcinkowski
Tom Hück
Artist Tom Hück was in a required course back in his college days when he peeled back the paper from his first-ever woodcut print and felt something in the cosmos align. “It was a knock-you-on-your-ass spiritual moment for me,” Hück says. “Everything that I wanted to be and everything that I wanted to do just all came into focus.”
After this discovery, Hück rushed to the library. He became devoted to what he describes as a “reverential study of printmaking,” digging into the lives of artists including Albrecht Dürer, José Guadalupe Posada, and Honoré Daumier. The process, he says, felt like finding members of his lost family.
Now, more than 20 years later, Hück is one of the foremost printmakers of the modern era. He runs an independent studio, Evil Prints, and his works have been featured in the Library of Congress, The Whitney Museum of American Art, and The New York Public Library, among other venues. The Saint Louis Art Museum has held the official archive of his work since April 2021. This fall, the public can take an inside look at his process with the release of Tom Hück: The Devil is in The Details, Prints 1995–2020, a retrospective published by Fine Print Small Press.
Photography by MATT MARCINKOWSKI
Greg Kessler and Tom Hück
Currently available for pre-order, with books expected to ship in November or December, The Devil is in The Details encompasses two decades of Hück’s artistic growth. Its visual components are supplemented with text from author Greg Kessler, who began interviewing Hück for the project in April 2020. The two bonded over a shared interest in punk rock albums, such as Motörhead’s No Remorse, and Kessler says their vision for the book was often the same. To Hück, the finished product is a somewhat surreal anthology.
“I go all day constantly filling my head with things,” Hück says. “I’m listening to music; I’m watching the news; I’m reading books; I’m absorbing conversation. I don’t shut down the art-making—ever. I even dream about it. It’s my whole being. I don’t do anything else, and this is what I was put [on Earth] to do.”
Those lived experiences are evident in Hück’s work. His prints, which tower over viewers at heights sometimes surpassing 7 feet tall, take years of meticulous preparation. “Electric Baloneyland,” his most recent major triptych, took five years to execute. Hück currently has a plan for the projects he’ll complete over the next 20 years.
A life consumed by work hasn’t always been easy, Hück says. Still, he knew that he would be an artist from the age of 2—it was something he had to do.
“It’s about the journey,” Hück says. “If you make it about the work first and no one ever sees a thing that you do, at least you’ll get to the end of your life and you’ll have had a fantastic dialogue with yourself.”
Album Art
Inspiration for Tom Hück and Greg Kessler starts in the record bins.
Both Hück and Kessler credit punk culture as a major influence in their work. For his part, Kessler wrote a 165-page thesis on the economics of American punk rock and possesses what he believes is the largest collection of St. Louis punk rock history anywhere. When he proposed that the text in The Devil is in The Details be formatted like liner notes—fashioned after those in his leather-bound copy of Motörhead’s No Remorse on vinyl—Hück was completely on board. Hück also drew early inspiration for his print titles from punk rock albums. He was particularly drawn to Dead Kennedys’ Let’s Lynch the Landlord for its alliteration, meter, and all-around punch. Those attributes served as touchstones for Hück’s later collection titles, including The Transformation of Brandy Baghead, The Hillbilly Kama Sutra, A Monkey Mountain Kronikle, and The Bloody Bucket. Hück says the title of the work sometimes comes before the actual visual concept does.
