Lyndsey Ingram is pleased to present new etchings, woodcuts and paintings by British artist Tom Hammick in the gallery space at 20 Bourdon Street. The gallery's first project with Hammick in the spring, Atlantica, was taken online and experienced virtually. The team are delighted to now be able to share Hammick's new body of work in person.
Nightfire will be a selection of work made within the last 18 months. These prints and paintings are connected by a stirring undercurrent that crackles to the surface as vivid outlines and surges across the work in expressive striations of colour. Hammick revisits compositions that have their roots in operatic narratives, poetry, film and literature. He explores what the different mediums of oil paint on canvas, woodcut and etching bring to each new iteration.
While Hammick’s familiar subjects of his family and the forested nature and sea beyond his studio reappear, the new works appear charged with an almost electric energy. Natural phenomena that normally appear in his work, such as the darkness of the sky, became much more intense during the past months. This inspired the artist to look afresh at the world around him and to focus even more on depicting the individual within the natural world.
As his 2019 publication with Adam Nicholson, The Making of Poetry: Coleridge, the Wordsworths and their Year of Marvel attests, Hammick has long been a passionate admirer of the Romantic tradition – in particular Coleridge’s ideas about recognising a pattern of the universe in nature. Affected both by the drama and solitude of the past few months, Hammick has sought to see the world in the everyday objects of his studio and local landscape, to glimpse the universal in the specific.
In the work on display at Lyndsey Ingram, Hammick reimagines his daily universe in an almost otherworldly palette: expressive colours appear as outlines or broad striations, fluctuating between heat and cold, joy and melancholy, taking the viewer on a sensory journey. With reverence for storytelling in all its forms, the new paintings bring his subjects to life with inspiration from epic tales, orchestral scores, and poetry.
"The images’ dramatic effects have been heightened not only by the experience of enforced isolation but they also bear the influence of Hammick’s time as Associate Artist at Glyndebourne Opera, during the latter months of 2019. Woven into the fabric of the recent paintings and prints are references to the plots of Die Zauberflöte, Fidelio and Tristan und Isolde – all of which revolve around stories about the testing of love."
- From Tom Hammick: Nightfire by Emma Hill