Lewis Hammond

47 Canal presents Bludgeoned Sky, Lewis Hammond’s first solo presentation in New York, comprising a new series of paintings that probe the experience of physical, political, and emotional dislocation.

Following Freud’s distinction between healthy mourning and pathological melancholia, Paul Gilroy, theorist of race, culture, and nationalism, has described Britain as mired in "postcolonial melancholia”––a persistent state that prevents the country from accepting the loss of Empire. Unable to relinquish the trappings of imperial dominance and exceptionalism, and unwilling to reconstitute itself as a nation among other nations, Britain longs for a falsely imagined racial and cultural homogeneity of times past, as Brexit, thirteen years of austerity policies, and the serpentine queues to view the late Queen Elizabeth II lying in state indicate.

Hammond, who grew up in Wolverhampton, England, and now lives between Berlin and London, is trying to understand the psychic life of the United Kingdom, the psychology of a people who repeatedly choose nostalgia over change, and of those who must live alongside them in an island nation that, after much human, environmental, political and economic catastrophe, seems to be “slipping slowly into the sea.”

Hammond’s catastrophe is less an event than an encompassing unease. Across the paintings in “Bludgeoned Sky,” Hammond confronts the viewer with closeups of objects and body parts devoid of explanatory context, rendering a world in which these figures are on rapidly disappearing ground.

Lewis Hammond (b. 1987, Wolverhampton, UK) lives and works between London and Berlin. Recent solo and duo exhibitions include: Kai Art Center, Tallinn, Estonia (2022); HFKD, Holstebro, Denmark (2021); Brücke Museum, Berlin (2021); La Maison de Rendez-Vous, Brussels, Belgium (2021); Casa Masaccio, San Giovanni Valdarno, Italy (2021); Lulu, Mexico City (2020); Arcadia Missa, London (2019). Recent group exhibitions include: 47 Canal, New York (2022); X Museum, Beijing (2021); Andrew Kreps, New York (2021); MOCO, Montpellier (2020); Kunsthalle Fribourg, Fribourg (2019); Galerie Barbara Weiss, Berlin (2019); and Antenna Space, Shanghai (2019). Lewis Hammond’s public collections include the Institute of Contemporary Art, Miami (US).