Patrick Earl Hammie at Gallery Gray

GALLERY GRAY

Location: Online

Gallery Hours: 24/7 365

Perhaps more than any other form of image-making, figurative painting is often read as a mirror of the time in which it is made; the canvas might be uniquely valued as a type of sociohistorical document. Exploring the tension between power and vulnerability, Hammie’s paintings question historical constructions of gender and race to expand the filters through which identity is understood. Blending traditions of the Old Masters with contemporary modes of representation, his portraits use body language and narrative to reconfigure inherited conceptions of ideal beauty and heroic nudity. Examining how male artists have presented themselves and the nude, his works symbolize his shadow-selves and move towards aspect of representation that have been historically skewed, are contemporarily taboo or underrepresented.