NYAB Event - Gabi Hamm "Paintings"

Gabi Hamm "Paintings"

Perry Rubenstein Gallery (527 West 23rd Street)

This event has ended.

Perry Rubenstein Gallery presents PAINTINGS, the first solo exhibition in New York of Stuttgart-born, Frankfurt-based painter Gabi Hamm.
Hamm's paintings are permeated by a timeless quality, the sense of a long-forgotten story or a moment yet to come. Building from a contemporary, quotidian vocabulary—the artist's oeuvre ranges from scenes of domesticity to casual portraits and not-unfamiliar landscapes—Hamm's use of light and muted color creates a wholly independent space; she establishes a distance between the subject on the canvas and its outside inspirations. This approach allows her to evoke not the particular, but a memory or atmosphere—a sentiment that rises slowly to the surface, without ever fully revealing itself. Hamm's technique encourages a pause, a shift of the focus to details, to atmospheres. The paintings invite the viewer to leave the media and reference-driven frenzy behind that directs our lives most of the time.
Using classic materials and methods such as oil paint and chiaroscuro, Hamm's technique is reminiscent of the Old Master and Romantic painters, a tradition with formative roots in her native Germany. As opposed to the quasi-deified, grave and solemn approaches of Old Master and Romantic painters, Hamm presents us subjects in the middle of very common actions, resulting in works that are intensely personal—yet to whom they are personal is not clear; Hamm typically blurs her subjects in a soft, unidentifiable surrounding, where the emanating sentiment of the painting plays equal to those who are painted.
Both figurativism and abstraction are present in Hamm's work, pointedly so in her landscapes, where an attention to mood and recollection is in play, rather than the direct transcription of the natural world. Hamm's paintings are all dated and numbered as opposed to titled, underlining her aim for something more universal than a direct representation of anyone or anything in particular. Her paintings are like visual remnants of time, of an action, of a place. Something caught and transformed into a surface that remains visible while the moment has already passed.