Hammer Blog

 
Gouge: The Modern Woodcut 1870 to Now Opens at Hammer Museum

On view at the Hammer Museum November 9, 2008 - February 8, 2009

Los Angeles, CA – Gouge: The Modern Woodcut 1870 to Now examines the woodcut in terms of its diverse forms and uses in the modern era. A thematic survey, it invites parallels between the medium in countries as diverse and geographically distant as Mexico, France, and Korea. Woodblock printing is, in fact, one of the most common artistic practices throughout the world. Although the motivations of each artist and the circumstances in which the woodcuts were made may differ greatly, the visual character of the gouge cuts is a defining thread among the selected works in this exhibition.

In its most basic form, the making of a woodcut requires just a block of wood, a cutting tool known as a gouge, some ink, and a

798 is the art district in a northeast section of Beijing that cropped up several years ago and has undergone dramatic changes in a very short time. As I understand it, it began spontaneously as an art district, as art and galleries seem to happen anywhere.

Hirsch Perlman
Operation Idiocracy, Roll 3, Frames 3/4, 2007
Chromogenic print
56 x 63 in. (142.24 x 160 cm) framed
Courtesy of the artist and Blum & Poe, Los Angeles
 


The Hammer recently added Hirsch Perlman’s 2007 photograph Operation Idiocracy, Roll 3, Frames 3/4, to the Hammer Contemporary Collection. For this series, Perlman created pictures documenting isolated explosions of his own making on his Los Angeles rooftop. This image was shot on one of the last few nights that he still had a rooftop studio (his landlord evicted him soon after). Only two in the series of roughly 30 black-and-white images are from actual “rooftop” negatives; the rest were shot after he moved the project indoors. Perlman colorized only two images in the series (all the negatives are b/w), which he printed himself in a larger format that he hoped would “accentuate the ‘cartoonyness.’ They seem

In just over one weeks time eight different cities in China and Asia hosted at least five contemporary art fairs, 4 biennials, and 3 triennials; Beijing, Guangzhou, Shanghai, Nanjing, Gwangzhu, Yokohama, Taipei, and Singapore.

 

Kara Walker’s most recent video installation, …calling to me from the angry surface of some grey and threatening sea, I was transported, has recently been jointly acquired by the Hammer Museum and the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York.

This five screen projection was completed by the artist in spring 2007 and premiered at the Venice Biennale that summer, before being added to her retrospective and shown at the Whitney Museum and the Hammer Museum.

While best known for her monumental black cut-paper silhouettes mounted on walls, Walker has been making short films since 2004, and three of these works were included in the survey of her work at the Hammer.

The newest work includes silhouettes of flat hand puppets depicting haunting emotional vignettes. For the first time Walker has set these black figures against intensely colored backgrounds, further set off by a soundtrack of music by