Hammer Museum

-- CURRENT EXHIBITIONS --

Heat Waves in a Swamp: The Paintings of Charles Burchfield
through January 3, 2010


The Hammer Museum re-examines the work of American artist Charles Burchfield with Heat Waves in a Swamp: The Paintings of Charles Burchfield, an exhibition curated by artist Robert Gober. Featuring over eighty major watercolors, drawings, and oil paintings drawn from important private and public collections, this exhibition also weaves together myriad ephemeral objects including doodles, journals, scrapbooks, and letters from the Burchfield archive at the Burchfield Penney Art Center. This combination of artwork and biographical material in Heat Waves in a Swamp provides new insights into Burchfield as a person as well as an artist.

Sharon Lockhart: Pine Flat Portrait Studio
through January 3, 2010


Blending the rigorous aesthetic concerns of a formalist with an anthropologist’s sensibility for community engagement and observation, Los Angeles-based artist Sharon Lockhart uses photography and film to create poignant, beautiful, and intimate portraits of her subjects. The series of color photographs collectively titled Pine Flat Portrait Studio (2005) present a spare, meditative series of portraits of children the artist came to know during her nearly four-year stay in the rural town of Pine Flat, California. Intending to stay for only a month, Lockhart was drawn in by the children of the town and eventually set up a simple portrait studio in an old barn where she took their photographs against a plain black backdrop with a large-format camera, using only the natural light from the open barn doors. In preparation for each photograph, Lockhart took Polaroids so that each of her subjects could have some say about the way he or she would be portrayed. The resulting images show the children as they want to be seen, projecting their sense of themselves through their clothing, postures, facial expressions, and occasional props. While the uniformity of Lockhart's process and the style of the final images belie her engagement with the strategies of conceptual art and the practice of anthropology, the lighting conditions required long exposures, resulting in a depth of color, detail, and emotional intensity that add a mesmerizing psychological complexity to these portraits.

The Bible Illuminated: R. Crumb's Book of Genesis
through February 7, 2010


Seminal comic artist R. Crumb has spent the last five years on this literal adaptation of the first book of the Old Testament, the Book of Genesis, bringing his signature zaftig women, mischievous animals and geeky men to the holiest of books. This highly-anticipated exhibition will be comprised of 207 individual black-and-white drawings incorporating every word from all fifty chapters, with no alterations, as well as an introduction and a map of the world of Abraham. A book featuring the complete set of drawings, with a handwritten introduction by the artist, will be published by W.W. Norton in late October 2009.

-- HAMMER PROJECTS --

Chen Qiulin..
through January 3, 2010

For the past several years artist Chen Qiulin has been exploring and documenting the rapid and tumultuous urbanization of Sichuan, her home province in southwestern China, where she still lives today. Although Chen works in multiple mediums, she recently began using video to engage her interests, mastering it without formal training. The Hammer will be presenting a selection of her videos from her first work in 2001 to her latest completed in the spring of 2009. This range allows us to witness her progression as an artist as well as the rapid and shocking changes taking place in her home town and outlying regions. From the chaotic dismantling of cities for the construction of the Three Gorges Dam, to the effects of modernization and newly found materialism on the younger generations, to the devastation of the 2008 Wenchuan earthquake, Chen shows us with stark and brutal reality, as well as gracious poetic beauty, a new China being born.
This exhibition is organized by Hammer adjunct curator James Elaine.

-- UPCOMING EXHIBITIONS --

Rachel Whiteread Drawings

The Hammer Museum presents the first museum retrospective of drawings by the British artist Rachel Whiteread. While her sculpture is well known and widely published, Whiteread’s work on paper has remained largely behind the scenes. “My drawings are a diary of my work,” Whiteread explains, and like the passages in a diary her drawings range from fleeting ideas to labored reflections. A crucial aspect of her artistic practice, they are produced independently of the sculpture yet evoke similarly poignant notions of presence and absence.
In this exhibition, Whiteread’s drawings will be accompanied by key examples of her sculptural work for the first time. Among the special features of the installation is a form of “cabinet of curiosities,” whose contents were selected by the artist. For Whiteread, the found objects and souvenirs she gathers from various sources such as attics, thrift stores, and more recently eBay belong to her extended notion of drawing. Including painted and punctured postcards, fossils, dental molds, and shoe lasts, among other things, these objects, like the rest of the works in the exhibition, belong to Whiteread’s collection of captured memories. Organized by Allegra Pesenti, curator, Grunwald Center for the Graphic Arts at the Hammer.

Desirée Holman
November 8, 2009 – January 31, 2010


Desirée Holman’s work seamlessly brings together elements of fiction, fantasy, pop culture, anthropology, and simulation. On view at the Hammer, the Reborn project—inspired by a subculture of women who purchase incredibly lifelike baby dolls and care for them as if they were alive—questions the notion of maternal instincts. Holman extensively researched this community and handcrafted several of her own “reborns.” The project then culminated with intimate, Mary Cassatt-inspired colored pencil drawings of mothers and their “babies” and a three-channel video featuring several women interacting with the reborn dolls in a variety of unconventional scenarios. Organized by Ali Subotnick, Hammer curator.

Rob Fischer
November 27, 2009 – April 1, 2010

Brooklyn-based artist Rob Fischer salvages materials from abandoned buildings and junkyards and reconfigures them into large-scale sculptural environments that weave past histories into the present. For the Hammer’s Lobby Wall, Fischer used recycled wooden floorboards from the gymnasium of a derelict school in southern Minnesota to create a labyrinth-like mural that winds around sculptures made of hand-painted and screen-printed signs and panes of glass. Inspired by the American mythology of the road trip, rooted in notions of freedom and self-discovery, as well as the thousands of miles of interstate highways that connect our cities and small towns, the overlapping and intersecting floorboards are like a map of a fantastical roadway. Organized by Hammer senior curator Anne Ellegood.
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