From 6 October to 15 November 2026, Edel Assanti presents an exhibition of paintings and monotypes by pioneering American artist, writer and curator Harmony Hammond. Staged at the gallery’s St James’s location in London, the exhibition marks Hammond’s first collaboration with Edel Assanti.

Bringing together works that challenge the traditional boundaries between painting, sculpture and printmaking, Harmony Hammond at Edel Assanti offers an encounter with abstraction as both a physical and political language. Across the exhibition, surfaces are built, punctured, wrapped and bound, becoming active structures rather than passive supports.

Material, body and abstraction

For more than five decades, Hammond has explored the bodily and corporeal possibilities of abstract art. Her work engages critically with Minimalism while rejecting its frequent associations with neutrality, detachment and formal purity.

Instead, Hammond approaches the painted surface as a kind of skin. Through additive and accumulative processes, she collages, patches, wraps and braids materials together. These gestures give the works a physical presence that suggests pressure, vulnerability, resistance and repair.

Strips of canvas are attached directly to near-monochrome surfaces. In some works, they are held together with thick pieces of painted twine. Elsewhere, metal eyelets punctuate layers of printed ink. The resulting compositions appear restrained from a distance, but their material details reveal tension, damage and persistence.

Hammond’s surfaces do not simply carry images. They embody the histories and labour involved in their construction.

Harmony Hammond’s Grommetypes

The exhibition includes examples of Hammond’s “Grommetypes”, a term originally coined by critic and curator Lucy Lippard. These works resist the conventional emphasis on repetition traditionally associated with printmaking.

Created through layers of printed ink, the Grommetypes occupy a space between monotype, painting and sculptural object. Their colours recall gunmetal, earth, parchment and dried blood, while metal grommets appear at regular intervals across their surfaces.

Titles such as Rims and Aperture draw on the vocabulary of engineering and construction. Yet the works never settle into a purely architectural reading. The eyelets may evoke mechanisms of attachment, while the distressed surfaces suggest wounds, scars or acts of repair.

Some compositions resemble flags, protective coverings or warning signs. However, Hammond deliberately avoids allowing these references to become fixed. Their political force comes partly from their refusal to resolve into one stable category.

Feminism and queer artistic histories

Hammond emerged as a central figure in New York’s feminist art movement during the early 1970s. In 1972, she co-founded A.I.R. Gallery, the first women’s cooperative gallery in New York. She later helped establish Heresies: A Feminist Publication on Art & Politics in 1976.

Her artistic and critical work has consistently challenged the separation of formal experimentation from questions of gender, sexuality and power. Rather than treating abstraction as detached from lived experience, Hammond understands it as a space in which identity can remain open, unstable and resistant to definition.

As the artist has written, “abstraction, like queerness, is indeterminant.” This idea runs throughout the exhibition. The works invite several readings at once, shifting between painting and object, surface and body, strength and vulnerability.

Their ambiguity is not an escape from politics. It is the condition that makes a more complex political reading possible.

A five-decade practice of resistance

Born in 1944, Harmony Hammond is an artist, author and curator whose work has been exhibited internationally. Her art is held in major institutional collections, including the Museum of Modern Art and the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, the Art Institute of Chicago, the Walker Art Center and the National Museum of Women in the Arts.

Hammond is also the author of several important publications on feminist and queer art. Her 1984 collection Wrappings: Essays on Feminism, Art and the Martial Arts became a foundational contribution to the history of feminist art in the 1970s. In 2000, she published Lesbian Art in America: A Contemporary History, which received a Lambda Literary Award.

Her latest publication, Still Dangerous! The Harmony Hammond Reader, edited by Tirza True Latimer, brings together writings that trace the connections between her artistic practice, feminist politics and queer cultural history.

At Edel Assanti, Hammond’s paintings and monotypes demonstrate how materials can carry memory and political meaning. Stitched, ripped, punctured and layered, the works turn abstraction into a record of endurance—one in which formal restraint coexists with a powerful sense of physical and historical tension.

Exhibition information

Harmony Hammond
6 October–15 November 2026
Edel Assanti, St James’s
11 Bury Street
London, SW1Y 6AB
United Kingdom

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