Marcus Hammond

Broken Peter Breaks Out

18 September - 16 October 2010

Broken Peter Breaks Out is Marcus Hammond’s first solo exhibition at BendInTheRiver and his first anywhere for 12 years. The intriguing title relates to ‘the kind of moment that my mind attaches to when I’m painting’. In this instance the moment is broken TV priest Peter Owen Jones breaking out of his material life, renouncing money and hitting the road.

Hammond’s method involves assembling a number of ideas, triggers and devices and launching freestyle into the picture plane – he talks about ‘just doing it’. His studio serves up an armoury of notations, prompts and templates that function paradoxically as both close friends and distancing devices. In the corner sits an old record player with its selection of music from Bach to Joy Division. One or two books attend the scene – observations on William Burroughs, writings by Robert Smithson, histories of the Anglo-Saxons.

The paintings themselves present a sensual field that is both intensely personal and distanced. The artist’s hand is present, but mediated through spray or template, and somehow denied. Arnulf Rainer talks about resolving his paintings physiognomically, and something similar is at work here. A number of the paintings appear to offer up faces but it is often impossible to convince oneself that they were meant. In fact, was any of it meant?

The presentation of the paintings further undermines the situation. Many of the works comprise a number of square panels that have obviously been re-arranged and rotated. Some are fixed but many are not. Are these things finished? ‘Where will it end?’, to quote JD.

MARCUS HAMMOND was born in 1964, and is the son of an architect. He studied fine art at Goldsmith’s College, London in the 1980s before burying himself in a number of big building projects that he sees now as extreme forms of displacement activity. Despite painting throughout his life he has exhibited only sporadically.

‘For me, painting is a selfish activity. I do it to keep equilibrium and to try to make the best painting that I can.‘ MH, 2010