David Hammons is a unique figure in contemporary art, the closest thing you’ll find to a genuine cult hero. For a start, the 71-year-old American artist is not represented by any single commercial gallery; he operates somewhere between the big-money art world and a New York street world populated (according to the mythology that surrounds him) by vagrants and hustlers. His art reflects this tension, particularly when you see it like this, exhibited in a high-end space, including as it does constant references to his African-American heritage and to outsider cultures.
In the first room you come to, huge abstract drawings filled with swirling, scuff-mark patterns – made by repeatedly bouncing a basketball against the paper – are propped against battered old suitcases. The idea is a sort visual pun, a play on notions of travelling (in basketball the term refers to a violation of the rules made when players move without dribbling the ball), as well as an homage to homelessness and constant movement. Yet for all its funky, low-rent associations, the whole thing also looks and feels smart and conceptual, even rather austere.
The rest of the show pushes these tensions to their limit, creating a sort of spooky, schizophrenic vibe. Four enormous paintings in the basement gallery are almost entirely covered by ragged sheets of tarpaulin and plastic, as if salvaged from a junkyard. Most striking of all, the gallery space itself has been deconstructed, with the plaster hacked away to reveal the gubbins hidden behind a wall, and missing lighting panels in the ceiling revealing bare neon. The sense is of a sort of concentrated ambivalence – a halfway state between visible and invisible, finished and unfinished, slick and seedy. Hammons may not quite be biting the hand that feeds him, but he’s certainly chipping away at its manicured veneer.
Gabriel Coxhead