The exhibition Harmony Hammond + Ivens Machado proposes an unprecedented dialogue between the work of Ivens Machado (1942–2015), a central figure in Brazilian art of the ’70s, ’80s, and ’90s, and Harmony Hammond (1944), an American artist, writer, and independent curator, pioneer of the feminist movement in the United States in the early ’70s. The exhibition weaves together the boundaries between body, materiality, and politics.
The works on view—sculptures, paintings, reliefs, and photographs produced between 1973 and 2023—challenge formal categories and employ materials such as concrete, iron, gauze, latex, and wax. These constructions foreground the physicality of matter through incisive gestures, evoking violence as both a conceptual and visual operation. While Machado explores the body as a site of biological and material tension, Hammond works in the friction between visual processes and political militancy. Both artists address the vulnerability of the human body and the instability of materials, creating abstract works of ambiguous nature—between wound and dressing, ruin and construction.
By bringing these two artists into dialogue, the exhibition not only builds bridges across distant geographies, but also underscores art as a tool for rupture and resistance. It proposes a possible encounter between bodies that, although far apart in space, share a common sensibility in the face of oppressive structures.
The exhibition is presented in collaboration with the galleries Fortes D’Aloia & Gabriel and Alexander Gray Associates.
