sailor - goon

… a terribly exhausting process.

Selected works by David Hammons

"In this series, the artist has draped a tarp or plastic sheet scavenged from the street over a canvas painted in a lush Abstract Expressionist style. The tension between distressed material and the abstract forms of the partially concealed surface beneath yields a mysterious formal beauty. Here, high abstraction is crossed with street culture, and the purity of the picture plane is interrupted by the lo-fi cover. The use of the cover also endows these two-dimensional works with a strong physical presence, blurring the line between painting and sculpture. These hybrid compositions stand in ambiguous, and perhaps critical, dialogue with European Modernism. At the same time, by turning on the polarities of visibility and invisibility, perception and omission, insider and outsider, they can be read as veiled commentaries on racial politics, art history, and misrecognition."

Sean Landers

Oil on linen