“Lewis Hammond: This Glass House” is the painter’s first public exhibition in the UK. Through baroque and surrealist motif, Hammond takes imaginative departure from both interpersonal relationships and global political events to create charged, fantastical works that mirror deeper realities.
Often fantastical, though always anchored in the present, Hammond’s work recalls fleeting memories and dreamlike states, cast through a lens inspired by both the Baroque and Surrealist movements. They interweave scenes of myth alongside reality, often depicting half-human creatures inhabiting dark architectural worlds. The paintings are visual explorations of the body’s interpersonal and individual relationships and operate a deeply enrapturing sense of otherness, navigating the fine line between existential dread and human comfort. Hammond’s practice explores themes of stasis, interiority, and contemplation. With a central focus on corporeality and underscored by a tangible sense of the uncanny, his figurative paintings capture a moment frozen in time.
“This Glass House” travels to The Perimeter from the Kunstpalais in Erlangen, Germany. The second leg of the exhibition features several new works not exhibited in Germany.
Lewis Hammond (b. 1987, Wolverhampton, UK) is a British figurative painter who lives and works in Berlin. Hammond graduated from the Royal Academy Schools in 2017 where he explains he became enamoured by “the immediacy and relative flexibility of oil paint”. This interest in exploring the materiality of oil paint is evident throughout Hammond’s practice. With his discordant union of dark and earthy tones, the artist renders unsettling and statuesque figures, harking back to conventions established by artists such as Caravaggio, Velázquez and Goya.
Positioned within a liminal space between the individual and archetypal, Hammond’s works play to the artist’s unique interpretation of the Surrealist tradition. The fantastical aura of his pieces derive from their symbolic potential, and the shifting perspectives from which they can be interpreted. The paintings encourage a sense of ritual and mythology, as the artist himself describes, they are “sideways reflections/representations of the complexities of lived experience—insecurity, anxiety, and the alarming socio-political landscape.” Indeed, within his paintings, Hammond is “simultaneously mining and inventing, nothing is fixed.”
The paintings in “This Glass House” are presented alongside a soundscape created by British musician Darren J. Cunningham aka Actress (b. 1979, Wolverhampton, UK). One of the most preeminent voices in UK electronic music, Actress credits a diverse array of genres, including early 1980s funk and electro, as well as house and noise. His music reaches disorienting heights, providing an apt soundtrack against which to view Hammond’s captivating and unsettling pieces.
at The Perimeter, London
until December 20, 2024