At the center of the Flower Power exhibition is a collection of flower pieces – a kaleidoscope of arcs juxtaposed with hatched backgrounds – A melody with a rainbow of colors. Flower Power is the latest iteration of Robert Hammond’s Visual Ritual conception. Visual Ritual is about strengthening our perception to patterns, surfaces, textures and reflection – emphasizing their properties. At the core of the Visual Ritual conception is the notion of line – how they focus, lead, and drop off the eye. Robert Hammond’s work is an interface of signals, which guides and activates, it seeks to crystallize everyday our ways of seeing, by simplifying illusion, outline, movement and abstraction.

Sparing, cool and deliberately void of context, Robert Hammond’s work is bold, elegant and alluring – a presence hard to ignore.

About the artist

Born in 1968, born in the UK of Lebanese decent, lives and works Beirut.

Robert studied Fine Art at St. Martins and WSCAD in the UK. Robert’s early works are painterly compositions in the neo-expressionist tradition. Robert’s latest works bring-forth new materials coupled with a new aesthetic, entitled visual ritual. Intelligent and bright, with a powerful and rich sense of the visual – in a short time Robert Hammond has become one of the most and newest exciting artists around. He has developed an extremely personal style that has tempered facility, virtuosity and surprise. Robert Hammond’s work exhibits a sense of order – interfaces that signal with an assortment of visual qualities he makes his own. In his wall sculptures, large cartoon faces and figures, outlined by thick curved metal profiles – contain montaged imagery behind polished glass surfaces. At first whimsical and cute – on second look you are peering through these figures into pulsating montages of dripping paint, concentric line patterns and smeared chalk. At play is a marriage of optical patterns, corrugated space and unfocused images. It is in the playful mastery of lines where the power of his art lies. His works are essentially metal line drawings, extruded into the 3rd dimension – at times concentric, converging and diverging, at times kaleidoscopic. Robert’s art is about strengthening our perception to everyday images, textures and reflection, emphasizing their curious properties by singling them out and playing them off against one another. His compositions are deliberate, sparing, virtuosic and concise – cool and without context. One can’t ignore the reflective quality of his works. Deliberately highly reflective – the art jumps beyond the surface – shining back to the viewer, testing the viewer’s retina. Robert’s works overall exhibit a visual bravado mixed with new visual lucidities – that bring facility and whimsy to large bright and powerful composition