Harmony Hammond

“Monochrome refuses disembodiment. It allows one to escape figuration but presence the body. All painting is about the skin of paint. The skin of paint calls up the body, and therefore the painting body. At their best, the paintings transmute the painting field into the body”.

Harmony Hammond

White Cube Bermondsey presents Harmony Hammond‘s first solo show in Europe featuring works created between 1971 and 2019.
Born in Chicago in 1944, Hammond is a pivotal figure in the feminist art movement in New York during the 1970s and her early work combined gender politics with both a minimal and post-minimal understanding of materials and process. Hammond’s abstract, monochrome oil on canvas paintings incorporate materials such as fabrics, push pins, metal grommets and rope creating active, textural surfaces that subvert the notions of monochromatic purity. This use of recycling materials is still present in her recent works: warm-white monochrome canvases are composed with grids of grommeted burlap, rope, push pins or straps, all overlaid with thick layers of paint.