Rust Never Sleeps by Harmony Hammond

Installation view: Harmony Hammond: Rust Never Sleeps, Alexander Gray Associates, New York, 2026

Harmony Hammond: Rust Never Sleeps
On view through July 24, 2026
At Alexander Gray Associates, New York, USA.

Rust Never Sleeps, the Gallery’s seventh solo exhibition with Harmony Hammond (b. 1944), features a selection of large-scale paintings made within the last three years, which continue Hammond’s engagement with and disruption of Minimalist abstraction, imbuing it with latent political content and a charged material presence. Bridging the divide between painting and sculpture, several of the canvases in the exhibition incorporate panels of rusted stamped metal, returning to a material that first entered Hammond’s work in 1988, four years after she moved from New York to New Mexico. Scavenged from dilapidated and abandoned buildings, these rusted passages hold the history of dispossession in the American Southwest, alluding to the severity of rural life and the grit required to survive it. Sharing the picture plane with these weathered overlays, Hammond’s signature grommet-studded, ripped, sutured, and overlapping pieces of painted canvas and burlap suggest both domestic textiles and a material language of concealment and political suppression.