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TOM HAMMICK: HOLDING
10 September - 4 October 2008
Holding is Tom Hammick's fifth solo painting exhibition at the Eagle
Gallery and celebrates a fourteen-year collaboration with the space,
since he first exhibited here in 1994.
Hammick's recent subject matter is autobiographical in its depiction
of the land and seascape around his home in East Sussex but it broadens
to encompass one of the most consistent themes in painting in its investigation
of the human relationship to place and space.
Initiated by a major large-scale image: 'Nocturnal: Paintings seen from
a Garden' (of the artist's studio lit up at night with paintings seen
in every window), the new works are fragments of an observed world that
are transformed and made emblematic.
Figures are shown in fields, tending to their gardens, standing at the
thresholds of their dwellings. A recurrent motif of mother and child,
bending over a vegetable patch or playing under a blossom tree, hints
at the easy intimacy of shared activity. Elsewhere solitary figures
are set against a landscape that seems to continue far across the edge
of picture plane, while on an uninhabited, night-time road the reflective
arrows on a chevron, point towards the darkness ahead.
The emotional complexity of these paintings is conveyed as much by colour
as by the imagery. Hammick's palette has darkened and deepened and the
new work gives rise to startling conjunctions of oranges and reds, thunderous
mauves and purples. In the poignant 'Garden II' three empty flowerbeds
are left as bare canvas against various shades of shimmering green.
A single figure stands in lonely contemplation, back turned towards
the viewer. It is a remarkably evocative image made by the simplest
means, for Hammick's pictures are everyday moments, common to each of
us, transformed through the process of painting into images that speak
of what it is to be human.
If you would like further information or images please contact the
Eagle Gallery
on 020 7833 2674
Gallery opening hours:
Wed – Fri 11 – 6pm, Sat 11 – 4pm
Closed during August
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