Gabi Hamm | Fictional Portraits, Various Vases
Text by Sabine Arlitt

Gabi Hamm is a German painter living in Frankfurt. For the past eight years, she has also been using clay as a medium as well as painting. Long fascinated by the potter’s wheel and the way a vessel rises up so quickly and almost magically as it turns, she bought a wheel and began teaching herself the basics through experimentation and constant practice. It takes time to develop a feel for the way a revolving mass builds and shapes into an object. Cylinder, sphere and cone are the fundamental forms of this centering-based technique. The process of expanding and narrowing, opening and closing the forms of a pot involves applying varying degrees of pressure to its walls. Gabi Hamm does not regard the many and varied vases she creates as an end in themselves, but as a starting point; while still wet, they can be shaped, cut open, folded out, bisected, segmented, expanded, compressed.

Flat fragments of forms, retained, are redolent of cutting patterns. And, just as the abstract planar forms of a cutting pattern form a three-dimensional covering for the body when the pieces are combined, so too do Gabi Hamm’s collaged fragments of different pots create new forms and sculptural objects that often have surreal and anthropomorphic traits. The resulting hybrids lie somewhere between abstraction and figuration, naturalism and fiction. The ceramics appear animated. Aligned side by side on a long plinth in the Fabian & Claude Walter Galerie, they conjure the notion of a catwalk on which we might imagine them filing past, kindling, as they do so, a sense that there is something transient about their presence.

Masks, as Gabi Hamm terms the relief-like forms that are loosely arrayed like a cloud suspended on the high wall of the gallery’s lower floor, form a group originating in her observation that a bowl or hemisphere, when seen from below, resembles a head, for which a face can be created with only minimal interventions. The process of combining various forms and fragments, as noted above, is illustrated in exemplary form by the masks. Their appearance is determined, in essence, by the characteristics that the forms themselves bring into play. The resulting interplay between association and confusion is underpinned alternately by wit and by emotion. Nothing is immutable; the sense of suspension recurs here in a different form.

The ceramic vessels are redolent of figures, and the figures in the paintings, in turn, are redolent of vessels, while the masks have something of portraiture about them. Although Gabi Hamm paints figurally, she nevertheless places her landscapes and portraits within a abstractly articulated space. The natural look of the colours is undermined by a painterly approach that, at times, seems to be seen through a colour filter. Her figures and landscapes, which are not so much stylised as reduced, are rendered with a lyrically light-flooded translucency of colour and a fragile equilibrium. The formative power of light is tangible. Even in the intimacy of her mostly small-format paintings, Gabi Hamm resists pinning things down and eschews psychologising. Accordingly, her portraits are less about about capturing some emotional mood than they are about presenting a state of mind reflected in a gesture or act. The focus is not on grief, joy or resignation, but on the body language expressed in some unguarded, self-absorbed moment of reflection that reveals unexpected traits.

Everyday observations, photographs taken either by herself or by others, as well as historical artworks, are all driving forces in her painting. Looking at Gabi Hamm’s paintings gives the viewer a feeling of remembering something, though without quite being able to put a finger on what it is. There is a constant sense of losing oneself, time and again, in what is essentially a state of flux, and of being drawn into a realm where one is torn between enchanted enthralment and a niggling sense of barbed whimiscality. The boundaries of the abstract pictorial space as such seem dissipated, and activated by purely colouristic means, at times with an almost monochromatic calm and at others in a dynamic burst of colour. Often, the figures seem to emerge out of some unfathomable depth, as though wresting themselves into a figuration of their very own making.

During the course of the seventeenth century, a type of facial study known as a tronie became established, particularly in Dutch painting. These portrait-like studies of the heads of mostly anonymous sitters bore allegorical meanings. Gabi Hamm seems to have developed the genre of the tronie in a very distinctive way, extending its scope into the field of potential visual perceptions.

In one of her paintings, a little boy places his hands together in front of his face in an almost geometric form, adding emphasis and depth to the area of his nose and mouth. There is something angelic about the way he props his elbows on a balustrade against the colourful backdrop of the bustling cosmos, commanding the in-between space like a baroque cherub. Graduated zones of varying density, almost like contrasting force fields, can be discerned. Gabi Hamm’s paintings explore allegories with tangible contemporaneity. Their compelling phenomenality is a vehicle for the similarity relations that represent otherness, openness and enrichment.