Beck & Eggeling International Fine Art is pleased to present its fourth solo exhibition of the Berlin-based artist Wolf Hamm in Düsseldorf (10 Sept – 29 Oct). With Zeitzeichen (Sign of the Times), the gallery will focus exclusively on Hamm’s drawings, for the first time, and the large significance this group of works has in the artist’s body of work.
Wolf Hamm’s sketchbook is his unfaltering companion. He’s practically drawing all the time: things he sees, thinks, overhears and associations he makes… everything finds a place on the nine by fourteen centimetre pages of his preferred sketchbooks. Hamm is a chronicler of his times and constantly thinks through art. His sketchbooks are archives of ideas, designs, attempts or concrete formulations. They constitute the stockpile from which he assembles the occasionally overwhelming worlds of images and ideas in his paintings. Those familiar with his reverse glass paintings know the complexity – both visually and intellectually – with which he comments on current affairs, the state of the world and the human condition in general and can easily imagine how the complex networks of motifs, meanings and implications, which seem to be conceived from many different ends, is held together by his sketches and handwritten notes up until the execution of the painting. The pages in the exhibition, which Hamm compiled from his work over the last 6 years, testify to at least one thing: a constant combination of and free association on specific themes (which can eventually become paintings). Many of the paperworks have been consolidated into cycles and series. Some of them were even conceived as such and developed in “a single pour.” Others were drawn from differing contexts and periods of production.
Alongside Hamms mastery of drawing, the exhibition also underlines the importance the artist has granted the medium of drawing, far beyond the mere preparation of paintings. He exhausts all possibilities, making the drawings into a completely independent complex of works within his ouevre. He moves between ink, pencil and oil stick, from the smallest formats of the sketchbooks to the occasionally meter large sprayed ink works, from pure contour drawings to the most detailed, intensely laboured pages.
Drawing, which naturally simplifies the process of working in series, enables him to explore a diversity of visual possibilities alongside his associative and sometime highly suggestive titles – far more than painting allows or can allow. Furthermore, it also allows for a more in-depth investigation of one specific thought. In contrast to painting’s large format, which always works with its own sublimity and intentionally employs it, Hamm’s sheets of paper have a touching directness that becomes all the more intense in the works which seem most contemporary: In the series Der Wertekanon (The Canon of Values), for example, one is confronted by people dressed in life jackets and boots. The enigmatic ambiguity of Hamm’s paintings is also preserved in the works on paper. Yet they touch the viewer with their tenderness, fragility and fineness without having to take ‘a detour’ through the viewer’s mind, visceral almost.
In addition to the forty or so paper works on show, a facsimile book will also accompany the exhibition. The edition of 500 booklets in the dimensions of Hamm’s actual sketchbooks compiles a selection of sketches and notes from the last years while showing the artist as more of a humorous, well-read, attentive and well informed contemporary.
The artist has included an original drawing especially made for the publication in 30 of the 500 books.

OPENING RECEPTION: Saturday, 10 September 2016, 12 am

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