Alexander Gray Associates opens an exhibition of work by Harmony Hammond

The First Art Newspaper on the Net    Established in 1996 Tuesday, March 19, 2024


Alexander Gray Associates opens an exhibition of work by Harmony Hammond
Harmony Hammond: Crossings. Installation view Alexander Gray Associates, New York (2020). Courtesy Alexander Gray Associates, New York © Harmony Hammond/Licensed by VAGA via ARS, New York.



NEW YORK, NY.- Alexander Gray Associates, New York presents Crossings, its fourth exhibition of work by Harmony Hammond (b.1944). Featuring paintings dating from 2018—2020, the show’s large-scale canvases boast built-up surfaces that further refine the artist’s interest in “material engagement,” expanding and subverting modernist abstraction to bring social and political content into the nonrepresentational realm.

In Chenille #7 (2018), fraying pieces of coarse burlap and grommets are embedded in Hammond’s signature layers of thick paint. Appearing at first glance to be a monochrome, up close, underlying colors are visible through cracks and peek out from flaps in the painting’s sculptural surface. Patterns created by the work’s raised grommets recall the soft, cozy texture and domestic warmth of white tufted chenille bedspreads. At the same time, reds, browns, and golds assert themselves from underneath the surface, oozing, discharging, and staining their surroundings to draw attention to what has been muffled, obscured, and covered over. In this way, the painting alludes to political threats and social unrest—marginalization and suppression—and lays claim to the physical vestiges of resistance and survival.

Meanwhile, Hammond’s series of Bandaged Grids transform strips of canvas into bandages that stanch paint leaking from grommeted holes. Recalling the artist’s use of found fabric scraps in the 1970s, the seeping grommets and red-stained cloth of Bandaged Grid #9 (2020) refute the non-objective nature of the modernist grid, interjecting a corporal narrative and violent edge into its strict formalism. As the artist notes, “A bandage always implies a wound. A bandaged grid implies a disruption of utopian egalitarian order—but also the possibility of holding together, of healing.”




Building on the conceptual framework that informs Hammond’s Bandaged Grids, her series of Bandaged Quilts use paint and other materials as a metaphor for the body. Featuring lengths of burlap and canvas arranged in quilt-like patterns, Double Bandaged Quilt #1 (Horizontal) (2019), Double Bandaged Quilt #3 (Vertical) (2020), and Fringe (2020) subvert the (male) legacy of Minimalist monochromatic painting, reclaiming these abstract compositions through the vernacular of (female) craft traditions.

Similarly evocative, Black Cross (2019–2020) and Red Cross (2019—2020) feature wide swaths of rough burlap superimposed like giant cross-shaped bandages on white fields of grommets. “They are crosses and not crosses,” Hammond muses. “I began these paintings during the summer of 2019. What reads as crosses weren’t initially meant as crosses, but rather as Xs marking the spot, as plus signs and intersections. And yet, I have to admit, that they are crosses. There are many kinds of crosses and many kinds of crossings.” Despite the scale and muscular materiality of the Cross Paintings, as a sign, the cross is indeterminate; its form references diverse cultural associations, including religious iconography, emblems of medical and humanitarian aid, and the modernist art historical canon.

A crossroads for meaning—where the metaphorical and formal meet and are transmuted—Hammond’s Cross Paintings and other recent works ultimately invite multiple readings rooted in the primacy of the canvas as a stand-in for the body. Presenting her paintings as sites where paint is transfigured into skin, the artist constructs surfaces that simultaneously express trauma and recovery. Recuperative paintings for this moment—wounded, yet protective—Hammond’s works embody vulnerability, strength, and defiance to resonate in a time of radical social change.

Harmony Hammond has exhibited nationally and internationally. In 2019, The Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum in Ridgefield, CT presented a fifty-year survey exhibition of her work, which traveled to the Sarasota Museum of Art, FL in 2020. Other institutions that have featured her work include: Whitney Museum of American Art, NY (2020); Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, IL (2019); Des Moines Art Center, IA (2019); Brooklyn Museum, NY (2018, 1985); Museum of the City of New York, NY (2016); Museum Moderner Kunst Stiftung, Ludwig, Vienna, Austria (2016); Rose Art Museum, Waltham, MA (2015); National Museum of Women in the Arts, Washington, DC (2011); MoMA PS1, Queens, NY (2008); Vancouver Art Gallery, Canada (2008); and Museo de Arte Contemporaneo Internacional Rufino Tamayo, Mexico City, Mexico (2007), among others. Hammond’s work is in the permanent collections of the Art Institute of Chicago, IL; Brooklyn Museum, NY; Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, NY; Minneapolis Institute of Arts, Minneapolis, MN; The Museum of Modern Art, New York, NY; National Museum of Women in the Arts, Washington, DC; New Mexico Museum of Art, Santa Fe, NM; Phoenix Art Museum, AZ; Wadsworth Atheneum, Hartford, CT; Walker Art Center, Minneapolis, MN; and Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, NY, among others. Her archive is in the permanent collection of the Getty Research Institute, Los Angeles, CA. She has received fellowships from the John Simon Guggenheim, Joan Mitchell, Pollock–Krasner, Esther and Adolph Gottlieb, and Art Matters Foundations, as well as the New York State Council on the Arts and the National Endowment for the Arts. Hammond’s book, Wrappings: Essays on Feminism, Art and the Martial Arts (TSL Press, 1984), is a foundational publication on 1970s feminist art. Her groundbreaking book Lesbian Art in America: A Contemporary History (Rizzoli, 2000) received a Lambda Literary Award and remains the primary text on the subject. In 2013, Hammond was honored with The College Art Association Distinguished Feminist Award. She received both the College Art Association's Women's Caucus for Art Lifetime Achievement Award and Anonymous was a Woman Award in 2014.










Today's News

November 16, 2020

25 Women.... 20th Century....

Louis K. Meisel Gallery now representing Davis Cone and Rod E. Penner

Asia Week New York 'LIVE' zooms-in on Tales of Conservation, Science, and Asian Art

Nahmad Contemporary opens first exhibition dedicated to Richard Prince's brazen, large-scale Cartoon Joke paintings

Alexander Gray Associates opens an exhibition of work by Harmony Hammond

Exhibition features an assembly of subtle and elegant works from the Tia Collection

Inside the mystery of a country moonshine bunker

Smithsonian's National Museum of the American Indian opens National Native American Veterans Memorial

The nude pictures that won't go away

PBS stations in Miami to air documentary of artist Rafael Soriano

A pledge to help artists becomes a lucrative lifeline

DC Moore Gallery opens an exhibition of new mesh paintings created since August by Alexi Worth

The 'detective work' behind a war novel

Inspiration from south of the border moves center stage in Houston

A pianist loses himself in a musical 'labyrinth'

Why do pianists know so little about pianos?

David Easton, architect for an American gentry, dies at 83

Rosanna Carteri, soprano who retired at her peak, dies at 89

French authors to pay fines of bookshops open despite virus closure

Egypt's Siwa fortress renovation boosts hopes for ecotourism

Lyman Allyn Art Museum features the works of creative photographer and tinkerer Todd McLellan

Rare items in upcoming Artifacts of Hollywood and Music auction

Ketterer Kunst announces online-only auction with rare original prints

Jose Dávila reimagines Central Wharf Park to bring community together in time of pandemic isolation




Museums, Exhibits, Artists, Milestones, Digital Art, Architecture, Photography,
Photographers, Special Photos, Special Reports, Featured Stories, Auctions, Art Fairs,
Anecdotes, Art Quiz, Education, Mythology, 3D Images, Last Week, .

 



Founder:
Ignacio Villarreal
(1941 - 2019)
Editor & Publisher: Jose Villarreal
Art Director: Juan José Sepúlveda Ramírez

sa gaming free credit
Attorneys
Truck Accident Attorneys
Accident Attorneys

Royalville Communications, Inc
produces:

ignaciovillarreal.org juncodelavega.com facundocabral-elfinal.org
Founder's Site. Hommage
to a Mexican poet.
Hommage
       

The First Art Newspaper on the Net. The Best Versions Of Ave Maria Song Junco de la Vega Site Ignacio Villarreal Site Parroquia Natividad del Señor
Tell a Friend
Dear User, please complete the form below in order to recommend the Artdaily newsletter to someone you know.
Please complete all fields marked *.
Sending Mail
Sending Successful