UNFOLDING DAYS: TOM HAMMICK

31 Jul - 14 Sep 2025

TOM HAMMICK
UNFOLDING DAYS
In a letter to Théodore Schempp in 1953, Nicolas de Staël wrote painting alone remains adventurous. As a young painter after art school in the early nineties, it still felt this way to Tom Hammick, despite the ascendance of largely non-painting, conceptual art of the YBAs at the time. For many years, painting is dead was the pronouncement made by the art establishment, and the poetic imagery of Tom Hammick, aimed at uprooting the viewer soul-first, as opposed to brain-first, felt out of place. Not until the sub-prime mortgage crisis in the UK, when a world in financial collapse opened the doors to a quieter and more reflective form of making pictures, would Hammick and many of his fellow painters feel less marginalized. Poetry, or the poetic in painting was back, after it had seemingly been banished for a whole generation or two of artists.
Four Friends in a Garden, 2025

Oil on linen

60 1/2 x 48 inches

Painting, for Tom Hammick, is not a choice, but akin to breathing. In Hammick’s words, “I can try with my own craft of painting, drawing and various print languages to make pictures that at best celebrate the specifics of my experiences of being human, as a means unto themselves and as a way of alluding to something more universal, beyond the reach of directly felt family life and friendships and love.” He continues, “a drawing of my son Charlie in a London park, or my children in a dark wood, or Sidsel and Johnno stooping over a flowerbed, or a horse grazing in front of a barn, can lead to a painting that requires a truth of these friends and on-the-hoof experiences in my life that is –I hope—both specific and universal. How to try and paint these things I experience and feel, and walk the line between my encounters and those that anyone looking at my work might connect to? To quote Elizabeth Bishop, “Life’s like that. We know it (also death).” This is what one craves for from the onlooker.”
Tom Hammick's work probes the human condition in pulsating color, pushing the materiality of each medium into a contemplative narrative. There is an undeniable oscillation between the quietude of the subject matter—a lone figure on the beach, three figures tending a garden—and the artist's distinctly exuberant palette. We as viewers are left with an electrified stillness.
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This exhibition presents one monumental-scale oil painting, Flowerfield, alongside six large oil paintings and a plethora of tiny paintings, drawings and paintings on carved printmaking panels. Hammick, a printmaker, at one time questioned the ‘fine art’ veracity of painted print plates, but noted, rhetorically, “was this an acknowledgment that the materials used in the process of making a print were their own elixir and had their own seductive truth?”
- Tom Hammick, Flower Field Night, E.V. 25/25, 2024
- Tom Hammick, Gardening, E.V. 25/25, 2025
Tom Hammick (b. 1963) is an artist living and working in London. He studied art history at the University of Manchester and later fine painting at Camberwell College of Art and NSCAD, Nova Scotia College of Art and Design in Canada. He has an MA in printmaking, also from Camberwell, and until recently taught Fine Art Painting and Printmaking for many years at the University of Brighton. Hammick is the proud father of three grown children as well as a lover of music, theater, film, opera and poetry, all of which informs his work. Hammick’s work is held in various public and private collections worldwide, including the British Museum, London; Victoria and Albert Museum, London; Pallant House Gallery, Chichester, U.K.; Towner Eastbourne, U.K.; Yale Centre for British Art, New Haven, CT; Library of Congress, Washington, D.C.; New York Public Library, NY; Minneapolis Institute of Art, Minneapolis, MN; Bibiothèque National de France, Paris; and The Art Gallery of Nova Scotia. Hammick was artist-in-residence at Glyndebourne from 2018-2020 and was selected to join the Josef and Anni Albers Foundation in New Haven, CT as artist-in-residence in 2024.
- Tom Hammick, Buda, Illinois, 2024

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