Tom Hunter’s latest exhibition, Living In Hell And Other Stories, are large-scale photographs that play on the sensationalist headlines. He parallels the violence, poverty and madness within the pages of his local newspaper, The Hackney Gazette, with the same themes in the paintings at The National Gallery. He draws on compositions and content from Old Masters like Cranach, Millais, Rubens and Velasquez to frame stories of strippers on the Hackney Road, murders in desert park, people being attacked with swans, old ladies living in cockroach-infested flats, and wedding parties turning into brawls.

For Batter or Worse inspired by…

Piero di Cosimo’s The Fight between the Lapiths and the Centaurs.

The exhibition runs through 12 March 2006, National Gallery, London.

Image gallery at the Guardian (with an audio tour by the artist), Telegraph, the BBC.