CHICAGO: Patrick Earl Hammie

Inheritance

February 25 - March 26, 2016

Artist reception: Thursday, February 25, 2016, 6:00pm - 9:00pm

Artist talk: Saturday, March 19, 2016, 2:00pm

KRUGER GALLERY CHICAGO

3709 North Southport Avenue

Chicago, IL

From krugergallerychicago.com:

Inheritance, a solo exhibition of paintings and drawings by Patrick Earl Hammie, will be on view at Kruger Gallery Chicago.

Hammie is an American visual artist best known for his large-scale portrait and figural paintings. His work draws from art history and visual culture to examine ideas related to cultural identity, masculinity, beauty, and sexuality. His paintings often use allegory to implicate power structures, and question systems of racism and sexism. Hammie is currently based in Champaign, Illinois.

As an exhibition, Inheritance presents a female and male figure locked in physical dialogue, hefting weight, and reorienting inherited expectations of ruined and objectified bodies that recall and carry on complex legacies of suffering and struggle. Informed by historical representations of Otherness, and recent shifts that locate women and people of color as central influencers of culture and politics, this exhibition provides occasion for us to encounter difference toward considering their capacity for establishing new narratives. Paintings such as Nadir feature a commanding woman rotating a reclined man’s body to his side. Constructing moments where traditionally masculine strengths (dominance) and traditionally feminine strengths (care and empathy) are conflated in the woman’s actions while the man’s body is vulnerable to public critique, Hammie introduces the woman as an active authority and relieves the man from macho performance.

Hammie was recently named an “Artist to Watch,” by the International Review of African American Art, for “producing phenomenal work that reflects their singular talent and merits our attention.” His work is a part of several collections including the Kohler Company Collection, JPMorgan Chase Art Collection, John Michael Kohler Art Center, and William Benton Museum of Art. In 2008, he received the Alice C. Cole ’42 Fellowship through Wellesley College, and in 2011, was an artist-in-residence at the John Michael Kohler Art Center. Hammie has exhibited in galleries throughout the U.S. and abroad including the Kunst in der Carlshütte in Büdelsdorf, Drawing Center in New York, and Indianapolis Art Center and has received awards from the Tanne Foundation, and Alliance of Artist Communities with the Joyce Foundation.

Hammie was born in New Haven, Connecticut in 1981. He received his BA from Coker College and MFA from the University of Connecticut. He currently serves as an Associate Professor at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign.

Exhibit Link