November 20 – January 17, 2015
Opening reception: Thursday, November 20, 6–8 pm
Lora Reynolds is pleased to announce The Arrangement of Separate Elements, a project-room exhibition of new paintings, watercolors, and drawings by Carl Hammoud. This is the artist’s second solo presentation at Lora Reynolds Gallery.
This body of work depicts objects most of us take for granted: books, clothing, a stack of hats, a pair of glasses. As with all of his work, Hammoud renders the imagery precisely and illusionistically, leaving little trace of his own hand in his trademark palette of cool blues and grays.
Hammoud composed each work from multiple sources—mostly glossy magazine ads and his own photos—and in some instances, a surprising array of materials. The painting Curtains, for example, is made with charcoal, acrylic, and oil paint and features imagery culled from three distinct source photos—one of a blazer, another of a tie, and a third of a shirt. Hammoud is remarkably adept at seamlessly combining separate elements, both material and visual.
These experiments in visual alchemy are driven by the artist’s interest in the subtle relationships between disparate objects, images, and ideas—such as in Orca, a drawing of a pair of trousers, ankles, and shiny, round shoes. The title of the piece explicitly introduces a referential space, wherein Hammoud proposes a connection between the drawing and a seemingly unrelated animal.
The key is Velocipede, a small drawing of a pair of eyeglasses that functions as an invitation to the viewer to look and really see—not only the works in this exhibition, but everything around us, all of the time. The boundaries between art, fashion, architecture, furniture, literature, theater, biology, and engineering are not as distinct as one might assume. Interconnectivity—global, digital, political, economic, social—is a defining feature of our times, yet its prevalence renders it almost invisible. People and their ideas connect with others in faraway places as smoothly as the elements of a Hammoud painting come together. The works in The Arrangement of Separate Elements bring the limitlessness of contemporary connectivity to the fore, inviting viewers to open up to the associative potential of their surroundings. This heightened awareness of an object’s ability to refer to more than just itself can help us better understand ourselves, our place in history, and how we relate to each other.
Swedish artist Carl Hammoud was born in 1976 and lives and works in Stockholm. He has exhibited extensively in Scandinavia, having mounted solo shows at Gothenburg Museum of Art (Sweden), the Malmö Art Museum (Sweden), and the Kalmar Art Museum (Sweden). He has participated in group shows at institutions such as the Magasin III Museum & Foundation for Contemporary Art (Stockholm), the Turku Art Museum (Finland), the Eskiltuna Konstmuseum (Sweden), and the Borås Museum of Modern Art (Sweden). His work is included in the collections of the Moderna Museet (Stockholm), Magasin III, the Malmö Art Museum, the Gothenburg Museum of Art, and the British Museum (London).