Scottish artist Henry Coombes explores the tension between instinctual, natural impulses and the constraints of polite society. He presents viewers with seemingly idyllic scenarios that gradually delve into the deeper, darker inclinations of human nature. In two of his recent films—Laddy and the Lady (2005) and Gralloch (2007)—actors don animal costumes and the traditional sportsman attire of the British elite, playing out scenes at once amusing, disturbing, and surreal. Both films will be on view in the Hammer’s Video Gallery marking Coombes’ first exhibition in an American museum.
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The Hammer introduces Houseguest, an occasional series in which we invite an artist to study the collections first-hand and curate an exhibition from our holdings. For the first of this series, Los Angeles-based artist Jennifer Bornstein visited the Grunwald Center for the Graphic Arts over a period of six months. She browsed through a historical landscape of works on paper, and selected prints, drawings, and photographs by artists as diverse as Rembrandt van Rijn and Man Ray.

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Sun Xun, a Chinese artist born in 1980 and living in Hangzhou, creates animations that combine hand-drawn renderings and traditional materials with new media. He studied printmaking at the China Academy of Fine Arts, but a burgeoning interest in moving images led him to found his own animation studio in 2006. To create his meticulous animations, Sun Xun produces a multitude of drawings that incorporate text within the image. His subjects range from elements found in world history and politics, to natural organisms. He then films the drawings, sequentially one at a time, to create a sense of movement and suggest the passing of time, the machinations of history, and the beauty inherent in simple forms. For over a week, Sun Xun will inhabit the Vault Gallery to develop a new animated, site-related video and drawing installation.
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Between Earth and Heaven: The Architecture of John Lautner
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Tomma Abts creates small, severe paintings that provide an intriguing antidote to the florid figuration that has dominated the contemporary painting discourse in the last decade. The exhibition, organized for the New Museum in New York by Laura Hoptman, Kraus Family Senior Curator, includes fourteen paintings, all of them the same size (19.8 x 15 inches), made over the past ten years. The exhibition at the Hammer Museum will also include a selection of pencil and color pencil drawings.

Abts won the Turner Prize in 2006 and this exhibition is the first individual presentation of the artist's work in a United States museum. Abts's commitment to abstraction is absolute. Her paintings are non-representational and free from all reference to nature or to the world at large. In the present contemporary art climate, these paintings may seem strange, aberrant, and even shocking. In their stab at profundity, the paintings are also intensely moving and relevant to our uncertain times. The exhibition will be accompanied by an illustrated catalog which will include more than fifty reproductions of the artist's paintings and drawings as well as feature essays by critics Jan Verwoert and Bruce Hainley, and curator Laura Hoptman.

Born in Kiel, Germany in 1967, Abts lives and works in London. She has had solo exhibitions at Kunsthalle Basel, Switzerland, Douglas Hyde Gallery, Dublin and Van Abbemuseum, Eindhoven (with Vincent Fecteau), and she’s been included in major international exhibitions including the 54th Carnegie International, the 4th berlin biennale and the 2006 Shanghai Biennale.
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Los Angeles-based artist Mungo Thomson’s works ponder notions of mysticism and the big questions in life with an underlying deadpan wit. For the Hammer’s Lobby Wall, Thomson presents a variation of his “Negative Space” project, which as he puts it, “came out of reflecting on the color of nothing; in outer space the void is black, and in the art context the void – the empty gallery – is always white.” Thomson found an online image archive of starscape photos taken by the Hubble Space Telescope and he’s been downloading the copyright-free images and inverting them with a simple Photoshop tool. The result is a spectacular starburst that looks more like a close-up of minerals or marble than space debris. For the Lobby Wall, Thomson has chosen the M74 and NGC 3370 galaxies.

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