April 02 – June 11, 2016

Opening reception: Saturday, April 2, 6–8 pm

Artist Talk: 7 pm

Lora Reynolds is pleased to announce Anti Image, an exhibition of new paintings by Carl Hammoud in his third show at the gallery.

In the past, Hammoud’s investigations have centered around the acquisition, organization, and interconnectivity of knowledge across all fields of study. He has painted objects and tableaux from academia, library science, and museology.

For Anti Image, Hammoud has turned his attention to the private space of the domestic sphere—depicting objects, but never the person (or people) they belong to. The paintings are sharp and crisp, neatly composed, and precisely rendered. Each new body of work is unified by a consistent color palette; the current shared ground is a dark, silvery blue-gray—as if the objects are in an empty room, illuminated only by moonlight.

Although the images are visually cohesive, the narrative they suggest (especially when considering their titles) is fractured, far-reaching, and inconclusive. An upended stovetop espresso-maker is called Untitled (Lunar Module). A pair of men’s shoes—just kicked off?—is Untitled (Cave). A painting of two stacks of books is titled Untitled (Summit) while another of a mountaintop is Untitled (Poster). Each title describes something other than the object in the painting, weaving a complex web designed to initiate an unpredictable line of questioning with no clear answers.

So much of what humanity has accomplished—agriculture, architecture, capitalism, biology, physics, astronomy, space travel—is a result of our curiosity and hunger for discovery. But progress is rarely linear. Exploration is worthwhile on its own, even when it does not lead to immediate, irrefutable insights.

Swedish artist Carl Hammoud was born in 1976 and lives and works in Stockholm. He has exhibited extensively in Scandinavia, having mounted solo shows at the Gothenburg Museum of Art (Sweden), Malmö Art Museum (Sweden), Eskilstuna Konstmuseum (Sweden), and Kalmar Art Museum (Sweden). He has participated in group shows at institutions such as the Magasin III Museum & Foundation for Contemporary Art (Stockholm), Turku Art Museum (Finland), Hangaram Art Museum (South Korea), and Borås Museum of Modern Art (Sweden). His work is included in the collections of the Moderna Museet (Stockholm), Magasin III Museum & Foundation for Contemporary Art, Malmö Art Museum, Gothenburg Museum of Art, and British Museum (London).