LOS ANGELES, CA.- All of this and nothing is the sixth in the Hammer Museum’s biennial invitational exhibition series, which highlights work of Los Angeles-based artists, both established and emerging, alongside a number of international artists. All of this and nothing features more than 60 works, much of it created for the exhibition, by fourteen artists: Karla Black, Charles Gaines, Evan Holloway, Sergej Jensen, Ian Kiaer, Jorge Macchi, Dianna Molzan, Fernando Ortega, Eileen Quinlan, Gedi Sibony, Paul Sietsema, Frances Stark, Mateo Tannatt and Kerry Tribe.

“The Hammer’s preceding Invitationals have all offered a glimpse into a specific trend in current art practices—All of this and nothing similarly highlights a philosophical and aesthetic sensibility that appears to be shared by many artists at this moment,” says Hammer director Ann Philbin. “The work unfolds with a quiet, slow reveal and it is the temporal and the transitory nature of human experience that these artists are exploring.”

The first major exhibition at the Hammer to be curated jointly by the museum’s chief curator, Douglas Fogle and senior curator Anne Ellegood, this exhibition presents a wide range of media including painting, sculpture, drawing, installation, sound, performance, and the moving image. The artists explore fundamental questions about our experiences of existing in the world and in the potential for art to reveal the mysterious and the magical. Reaching beyond exclusively visual references, many works incorporate aspects of music, literature, science, mathematics, sound, or time into their subject matter or structure. This group of intergenerational artists closely considers the process of art-making in their work by playing with scale, the ephemeral quality of their materials, the nature of time and language, and the relationships between the objects that they create. Their work explores ideas of disappearance and reemergence, of shifting visibilities, as well as the beauty found in the everyday. These artists resist notions of autonomy and completeness in favor of openness to multiple interpretations over time. For them the value of the work resides more in the process of its making than in the resulting objects.

“When Anne and I first started talking about this show we realized that many of the artists we were both interested in have an incredible ability to find the poetic in everyday objects and materials. We wanted to explore the many ways their work engenders curiosity and expands perception,” says chief curator Douglas Fogle.

Whether using the floor as a canvas in order to build up topographies of powdered pigment (Karla Black), sewing fabrics onto canvases instead of using paint (Sergej Jensen), taking apart the language of political manifestos and translating them into musical scores (Charles Gaines), reinvesting mundane materials such as cardboard and packing materials with a new aesthetic life (Gedi Sibony), or exploring the structural language of film in an analysis of the subjective nature of memory and time (Kerry Tribe), these artists conceptually and emotionally invest simple (and sometimes found) materials with a newfound poetic meaning while offering a thoughtful meditation on the fragility of our lives and the objects that make up the world around us.

“All of this and nothing is also the first major example of the ongoing programmatic collaboration between the Hammer and LA>
The exhibition—situated in the Hammer’s Galleries I and II, as well as in the newly designed G6 gallery on the courtyard level, the lobby gallery, and the renovated video gallery—will give each artist his or her own space in the exhibition. Each artist has a substantial presence in the show, some taking over entire galleries with large installations or groupings of new works, while others share galleries in meaningful juxtapositions with one another.