NYAB Event - Jonathan Hammer "KOVNO/KOBE"

Jonathan Hammer "KOVNO/KOBE"

MIYAKO YOSHINAGA art prospects

This event has ended.

For the past two decades, Jonathan Hammer has investigated the concept of narrative through a unique practice that includes such traditional techniques as etching, Japanese screen-making, 16th-century marquetry and the ancient art of bookbinding. From the image-text interplay of his lavish leather-bound tomes that bring together the work of contemporary artists and writers to the theatrical, story-based characters that populate his drawings and etchings to the historiographic corporealism that underpins his exotic animal-skin screens, Hammer mines the complex and sometimes troubling chronicle of our shared past to inform poignant meditations on the human experience.

For KOVNO - KOBE, Hammer finds inspiration in his Lithuanian heritage, taking as his point of departure a little-known cross-cultural event from World War II in which some 2,100 Lithuanian Jews managed to escape the Nazi campaign of genocide by finding an unlikely safe haven in Japan, then an Axis power and German ally.

Presenting pastels, gouaches and etchings in addition to the exhibition's eponymous centerpiece -- a two-fold screen made from the marquetry of exotic animal skins and precious metals such as gold and palladium -- Hammer contrasts the perspectives of the victims and victimizers of the massacre in Kovno, Lithuania, with those of the witnesses and saviors in Kobe, Japan. These works cast a new light on an extraordinary yet relatively unknown story from World War II.