Jane Hammond: Chocolate Cosmos, String of Pearls
Current exhibition
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Berggruen Gallery is proud to announce Chocolate Cosmos, String of Pearls, an exhibition of new work by New York–based artist Jane Hammond. This exhibition will mark the gallery's third solo exhibition with Hammond.The gallery will host an artist discussion with Hammond on Thursday, October 23, at 4:30 PM, followed by an opening from 5 – 7 PM.Jane Hammond’s forthcoming publication, Chocolate Cosmos, String of Pearls, will be released spring 2026.
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Works
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Chocolate Cosmos, String of Pearls features mixed-media botanical assemblages composed of images acquired through a rigorous process of research and collection, yet arranged improvisationally. Hammond's hyper-detailed compositions probe the relationships between ecology, observation, and knowledge. Through a system of images shaped by the poetics of language, Hammond produces lavish arrangements of vivid and fantastical forms drawn from the natural world. Using several printmaking techniques such as relief printing and linocut, as well as combining painting and drawing, Hammond’s compositions employ myriad methodologies. Hammond often prints from hand-made plates on painted and collaged grounds.
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Hammond’s works draw on both found and personal photographs she has collected over many years. She recontextualizes these images, often dramatically altering color, scale, and resolution, and builds her arrangements based on symbolic and physical associations. Her botanical arrangements brim with flora and fauna from disparate species across continents and temporalities, resulting in bouquets that exist outside the realm of possibility. While beautiful and meticulously arranged, these are not traditional botanicals. Hammond’s works—made up of both living and extinct flora and fauna—present a plentitude both ravishing and increasingly threatened by ecological destruction.Shaped by the aesthetics of post-minimalism in 1970s New York, Hammond avoided botanical subjects for decades, though an interest in the natural world was a throughline in her childhood, education, and later life. Of the work in Chocolate Cosmos, String of Pearls, Hammond has said: “It’s a different enterprise to make these botanicals now than it would have been 30 years ago because the environment from which all this plentitude emanates is now intensely jeopardized."
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Hammond also has a keen interest in the history of material culture. She mines the traditions of ceramics, glass, and metalwork across the globe for her containers, as well as the world of artisanal papermaking for the handmade grounds she crafts for each piece. These unique compositions are made of many heterogeneous and often conflicting elements, yet ultimately resolve harmoniously. Hammond's rigorous compositional process involves constant readjustments of placement, scale, and color until she achieves a desired “harmony built from tension and difference.” These tensions impart power and vitality to their final resolution. Hammond's works play with language, allegory, and games to invite the viewer into a mythical world blooming with an encyclopedic collection of images, where edification comes from searching and surprise.Jane Hammond was born in 1950 in Bridgeport, CT. She received her B.A. from Mount Holyoke College in 1972, an MFA from Arizona State University in 1974, and a second MFA from the University of Wisconsin–Madison in 1977. Her work is in the permanent collections of over eighty museums, including the National Gallery of Art, SFMOMA, the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and the Museum of Modern Art. In 2019, she was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship. Her work has been featured in The New York Times, ARTnews, Art in America, and more. Hammond currently lives and works in New York City.
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Artist
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