LONDON.- Lyndsey Ingram announced that the gallery now represents the artist Tom Hammick (b. 1963), an important figure on the British art scene over the past two decades.
Due to the current health crisis, the gallery will host Atlantica, a virtual exhibition of Hammick’s sea imagery. Originally planned for the now-cancelled London Original Print Fair, this exhibition will be staged on all of the gallery’s online platforms for three weeks beginning on 14 April.
Lyndsey Ingram comments, ‘At this difficult time, we aim to creatively develop our presence in the virtual space and we hope Hammick’s show will offer inspiration and a sense of escape, as people may be increasingly confined to their homes. In this show, Hammick explores the infinite nature of the sea – something everyone knows, yet remains beyond our control and understanding.'
Lyndsey Ingram’s major solo exhibition of Tom Hammick Beneath the Wide, Wide Heaven was due to open at the gallery on 16 April and will now be postponed. The show is a survey of the artist’s work, focussing on his recurring imagery of woods at night. Hammick makes work from a Romantic’s standpoint, in thrall to the visual intoxication of the world. However, on closer reflection, all is not what it may seem. For example, in his new painting and woodcut ‘Dark Woods of England’ (illustrated above), a particularly British scene straight from A Midsummer’s Dream resonates with motifs from Purcell, Shakespeare and Benjamin Britten. The wood depicted appears to show a half coppiced moonlit playground as part of a farmed wilderness, with humans and nature symbiotically living in harmony. But in the context of Brexit and Extinction Rebellion, the image takes on a more dystopian air of an Arcadia in crisis.
This large-scale work, meant as the centrepiece of Hammick’s solo show at Lyndsey Ingram, is also on the cover of the Glyndebourne 2020 season programme. Hammick has been named to the prestigious position of Associate Artist at Glyndebourne this year, following artists such as Peter Doig and Georg Baselitz. An exhibition of Hammick’s new monumental woodcuts and etchings inspired by the 2020 Festival is scheduled to adorn the outer walls of the celebrated Sussex opera house between 21st May and 30th August 2020.
For Ingram, Hammick’s work is a poignant comment on our times and also fits beautifully into her gallery’s context of showing prints and works on paper that push the limits of the medium: ‘Perhaps no other artist besides Munch creates prints and paintings that can stand alongside each other as equals, in scale, technique and sophistication. Hammick’s printmaking technique is incredibly complex. For example, he creates jigsaw woodblock prints in which he repaints each block between impressions, creating one-of-a-kind prints within a single edition. His prints have a painterliness and his paintings have a deceptively simple print-like quality – both are technically rich and evocative and full of poetic expression.’
Tom Hammick is now predominantly found in either his painting or print studio in Sussex. Most recently he is a recipient of the Josef Albers Award 2020, and the Glyndebourne Associate Artist Residency, 2020. He has been awarded several prizes including The V&A Print Prize and The RA Print Prize and many residencies in the UK and abroad. His work is held in many international and national public collections, including British Museum (Collection of Prints and Drawings); Victoria and Albert Museum collection of Prints and Drawings, Yale Centre for British Art, U.S.A., the Library of Congress in Washington D.C., the Bibliothèque National de France and the Fine Art Academy of Beijing.
