Frederick Hammersley
Essays By: Dave Hickey; David Pagel; Arden Reed and
Joseph Traugott
ISBN# 978-0-9823736-0-6
Hardcover with dustjacket
9 1/2” x 12”
192 pages
180 color plates
$65
ART SANTA FE PRESENTS
is pleased to announce the upcoming publication
FREDERICK HAMMERSLEY: WORKS FROM 1938 THROUGH 2001
scheduled to appear in spring 2009. Long overdue,
this substantive, lavishly illustrated volume will
follow the highly acclaimed artist’s career with
over 100 color plates of works spanning Hammersley’s
oeuvre from the late 1930s up until 2001―including
his celebrated series of “Hunches,“ Organics,” and
“Geometric” abstractions ,as well as his journals,
early figurative and sculptural work along with his
seminal computer drawings from the 1960. In praise
of his prolific work, Dave Hickey writes “Frederick
Hammersley’s paintings are the best-kept secrets in
the art world and easily the most ravishing ….since
the early 1940’s, he has been making abstract
paintings full of rigor and cosmopolitan wit.”
About the Artist:
Hammersley gained recognition in the 1950s as a
member of the groundbreaking California group termed
the “Abstract Classicists,” which included Karl
Benjamin, Lorser Feitelson and John McLaughlin.
Later this groundbreaking abstract style was dubbed
“West Coast Hard Edge,” and achieved international
recognition in cities such as London and Belfast. In
recent years, Hammersley’s work has witnessed a huge
resurgence, gaining increased visibility in numerous
gallery and museum exhibitions around the country--
most recently in The Birth of the Cool, an
exhibition organized by the Orange County Museum of
Art and traveling to Addison Gallery of American
Art, Phillips Academy; Oakland Museum of California;
Blanton Museum of Art, Austin, through 2009.
About the Authors:
This scholarly publication also features essays by
renowned art historian, critics, and writers Dave
Hickey, David Pagel, Arden Reed, and Joseph Traugott.
Each author explores a phase, time period or an idea
threaded through Hammersley’s body of work. Several
of thes texts investigate the artist’s idiosyncratic
process, analyzing his technical procedures and
philosophical base that ultimately have come to
define his unique vision and diverse output. In this
vein, Hickey remarks, “hammersley’s applications of
method yield a protean field of consequences. All
Hammersley’s paintings, in fact, may be said do
different things, rather in the manner of Edward
Ruscha who has painted thousands of words in
thousands of rectangles but never to the same end,
never aspiring to the same effect.” |
