Harmony Hammond: Crossings

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.

Bandaged Grid #9 (2020) features fields or grids of grommets. Layering patches of fabric over grommets, in this work, Hammond evokes a bandaged body. As she notes, “a bandage always implies a wound. A bandaged grid implies an interruption of the narrative of the modernist grid and therefore, an interruption of utopian egalitarian order … a precarity. But also, however fragile, the possibility of holding together, of healing.” As well as referring to the body and the history of modernism, a gridded field of grommeted holes physically opens the painting surface, alluding to layers and unseen spaces. Hammond’s Bandaged Grid series (2015-present) develops out of the artist’s near monochromes, combining an earth-based palette with an expanded vocabulary of found fabrics layered in horizontal rows onto the canvas. The use of found material scraps traces back to Hammond’s work of the 1970s, which was made from the fabric discards of friends and businesses in New York’s garment district. Then as now, Hammond harnesses these materials as a means to disrupt the art historical canon. As she explains, “Found and recycled materials and objects are one way to bring content into the world of abstraction, as they all have histories that accompany them wherever they go.”

Harmony Hammond

Bandaged Grid #9, 2020

Oil and mixed media on canvas

78 1/4 x 110 1/4 x 4 in (198.8 x 280 x 10.2 cm)

Double Bandaged Quilt #1 (Horizontal) (2019) continues Hammond’s exploration of “material engagement.” Building on her previous series of Bandaged Grids and Chenilles, Double Bandaged Quilt #1 incorporates a multi-layered, built up surface of overlapping strips of burlap and canvas, applied from the edges of the work to mimic a pieced quilt pattern. Repeatedly overlaid, the material — suggestive of bandages — does not quite cover the entire surface, leaving exposed blood-red slits at the painting’s opposing centers.

Double Bandaged Quilt #3 (Vertical) (2020) continues Hammond’s exploration of “material engagement.” Building on her previous series of Bandaged Grids and Chenilles, Double Bandaged Quilt #3 incorporates a multi-layered, built up surface of overlapping strips of burlap and canvas, applied from the edges of the work to mimic a pieced quilt pattern. Showing ruptures and seams, the agglomerated material elements appear to emerge from and disappear into the canvas, creating a sense of three-dimensional relief, casting a shadow on the off-white coverlet below. Punctuated with protrusions, holes, seams and fraying edges, they foreground notions of suture and concealment – of hidden layers, spaces or narratives that lie beneath the surface. 

Among the most recent paintings is Black Cross (2020) which incorporates found burlap and grommets inserted in an irregular grid along the surface of Hammond’s signature layers of thick paint. Building on her recent series of Chenilles, works like Black Cross are punctuated with protrusions, holes, seams and fraying edges, foregrounding notions of suture and concealment—of hidden layers, spaces, or narratives that lie beneath the surface. 

Contending that  the “body is always near,” Hammond’s use of materials in Red Cross elicit notions of the canvas as a metaphorical body, a place where surface and skin meet; where grommets serve as stand-ins for wounds and orifices; burlap straps infer bandages; and the formal quality of the cross-like element indirectly suggests an outstretched figure. At the same time the painting’s composition responds to the artist’s surroundings in New Mexico, where crosses as religious symbols dot the landscape. Emerging from Hammond’s near monochrome paintings, which simultaneously engage with and challenge the narrative of modernist painting, Red Cross invites content and positions painting as a site of negotiation between what exists inside and outside the picture plane.

Ultimately, the complex surface of Fringe is reflective of Hammond’s interest in what she identifies as a “survivor aesthetic.” She concludes, “My work … has to do with piecing things together and making something out of nothing. It’s about rupture, suture, and endurance.”