In 9 to 5, HERSOID turns his sardonic gaze on the slickest tragedy of late capitalism: the corporate man—suited, salaried, slumped. This new series is a bruised ballet of unconscious bodies, each figure finely rendered and floating in negative space like discarded icons of a failed religion. These are not portraits of power, but of collapse masquerading as leisure—high-functioning dysfunction draped in Italian wool.
The businessmen depicted are faceless, slack-limbed, and exquisitely overdressed. Their bodies suggest both victory and ruin. Some appear to have fainted mid-celebration; others seem to have simply stopped functioning, like corrupted office equipment. HERSOID paints them with an almost forensic delicacy, the shadows under their knees as carefully modelled as the folds in their silk ties. The absence of background is deafening—it places the men in a conceptual purgatory, floating somewhere between a corporate retreat and a moral void.
This is Wolf of Wall Street post-mortem. The suits are still pressed, the watches still ticking, but the human engines have failed. Beneath the polish is something closer to horror than humour. The series echoes the grotesque contradictions of Egon Schiele’s figure studies and the performative weariness of Francis Bacon’s suited men, but it’s reframed for our present era of burnout, offshore banking, and disappearing pension funds.
Here, HERSOID leans into one of his core themes: complicity. These aren’t villains, exactly—they’re avatars of a system that rewards recklessness and calls it ambition. Each painting is a quiet indictment of a class that is always falling, yet never seems to land. The series speaks to a broader cultural hangover: the cost of letting the high-functioning drunk pilot the economy.
Within the broader exhibition, 9 to 5 forms a sly counterpoint to Collapse and Mismanaged Consent. Where the former showed the physical failure of structures, and the latter exposed the illusions used to uphold them, 9 to 5 places the human instrument at the centre—the polished, exhausted figure who signs the papers, swallows the lie, and wakes up in the wreckage.
This is not a moral tale, but it might be a warning. Or a eulogy. Or just Tuesday in the boardroom.
