Harmony Hammond
Through Jan. 16. Alexander Gray, 510 West 26th Street, Manhattan. 212-399-2636; alexandergray.com.
For decades Harmony Hammond has been making textile art which, as Holland Cotter wrote last year on the occasion of her first museum retrospective, troubles the boundaries between traditional media. A sculpture might have the sheer planes and intricate color balances of a painting; a painting might be as insistently chunky as a sculpture.
But the group of large new canvases showing now at Alexander Gray Gallery, though they start from similar premises, have a slightly different effect. The titular grid of “Bandaged Grid #9” is made of brass grommets poking through horizontal strips of cloth. Most of these strips are the color of dirty field dressings, but a few are soaked in red, including a lone vertical rectangle that hangs down like a bloodied flag of surrender. In two “bandaged quilt” paintings, white strips are laid out in concentric rectangles — like bird’s-eye views of ziggurats — that culminate in narrow exposures of an underlying red. “Black Cross” and “Red Cross,” with graphic shapes laid over more grommets and seams, are pointed rejoinders to a whole history of modernism.
In all of them, texture plays as vital a role in the viewer’s impression as color or shape, particularly the scarlike lines where “bandages” overlap. But I wouldn’t call them sculptures, or even exploded paintings. They’re simply paintings that are honest about being objects.
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