Learning Specialist, Carolina Malagamba: This is a piece by David Hammons, and I want to invite you to look at it first from afar and then come closer to it.
We see this person in profile, we can see their face that is tilted upwards, and then the arm that we can see is angled towards the body, and maybe in a praying position.
This piece is part of a larger series called Body Prints, and it looks more like something between drawing and printmaking. In printmaking, a surface gets covered in paint, or in ink. You then press that surface onto paper. Once you peel your object off, you have a paper with the image, and this is called a print.
Artist, David Hammons: I don’t work in an academic way. I work in more of an intuitive, improvisational way.
Carolina Malagamba: While a traditional material for printmaking would maybe be wood or linoleum or metal, Hammons actually uses his body as the printing plate. The artist covered himself, both his skin and his clothing, with some sort of grease. This could be lotion, oil, grease, or even butter. He then pressed himself against the sheet of paper, peeled himself off, and he would sprinkle that print of grease with graphite or powdered pigment.
I think this piece is a really great example because he uses materials that are easily accessible—our own body, grease, paper—but he uses them in a very unexpected way. It’s almost like he created his own category, his own style of art-making.