Harmony Hammond

Harmony Hammond is an artist, curator, author and activist who was a leading figure in the development of the feminist art movement in New York in the early 1970s. Hammond’s artwork combines gender politics with post-minimal concerns of materials and process.

She creates hybrid painting-sculptures that integrate paint and mixed media including fabrics, metals and waste materials.

Double Elegy is one of her self-described ‘nearmonochrome paintings’. Two dense fields of paint are horizontally divided. The work shows how the manipulation, presentation and materiality of paint function as carriers of meaning, as much as any imagery.

She brings socio-political content into the world of abstraction, for instance queer and feminist concerns around the body. She says, “The body is always near. Monochrome refuses disembodiment…All painting is about the skin of paint. The skin of paint calls up the body, and therefore the painting body.”