Two Person Exhibition with Hanna-Maria Hammari and Vera Palme

In DOUBLE, the works of Hanna-Maria Hammari and Vera Palme are protagonists in a constellation that leads us into an unsettled terrain. Tactics of imitation and deception generate a double play with the present by shifting, exaggerating or parodying physical and affective states. Crossings between nature and culture take the artists to hybrid forms that constantly develop new images from within themselves. This moment of emergence as well as the illusory capacity of the materials create a positive confusion.
In the ceramics of Hanna-Maria Hammari, the elegant aesthetics of the struts are combined with the violence of a threatening mechanism. Their forms are orientated towards protective gear of the body and at the same time reflect the ruthless capture of living beings. Thus, a vulnerability returns in the sculptures, which affects all living and dead things alike. The vertically standing wooden objects also invoke ambivalent mixed forms in their physicality. Divided into segments, they end in extensions that receive their potential mobility through deep incisions. Demonstratively, the objects leave their tails hanging, frozen in an interplay between passivity and latent aggression.

In a different way, Vera Palme’s paintings negotiate the possibilities of their medium in order to immediately reveal them as imitation and persiflage. Recesses on and at the edges of the canvases support the appearance of the motifs as multiple framings. These enclosures can fan out further into labyrinthine lines, they border rampant thickets or ornamentally structured objects. Biomorphic contours such as grains and growths blend with architectural figures. Captured in an undirected process of both creation and decomposition, the depth inherent in the paint itself pushes forward repeatedly.

In DOUBLE, works by the artists come together, which call for an increased sensitivity towards things and living beings. This also includes mutual exchange    – in the awareness that artistic work is always embedded in a network of complex transformations, negotiation and appropriation with and by others.

 – Simone Neuenschwander