Brad Hampton

PAINTINGS 2013:

The white marks that float through and define Brad Hampton's new work are not holes. They are also not exactly marks. In these bold and fascinating pieces these shapes function in complex ways. On the one hand, they are the enigmatic and playful descendants of Lichtenstein's word balloons. On the other they skitter off the edge into the no man's land of the world beyond the work's border creating a crazy new dimension. They lie on top of other denser imagery derived from the fritzing of information in the scanned world. They dance around like calligraphy but their relationship to the visual world and to representation in general opens whole new realms of ways to think about space, the machine, and the hand. Visually full and lush, these new works are also powerful puzzles that question the boundaries between the real and the represented. 

-Laurie Anderson