Carl Hammoud | Retrospective

Galleri Magnus Karlsson is pleased to present Carl Hammoud's third solo exhibition in the gallery.

The exhibition Retrospective is no regular retrospective. The title refers to 'looking back' and is also the name of Carl Hammoud's first video work. Thousands of photos have been merged to visualize the process of making the paintings in the exhibition. The compressed flashback presents a course of events where the history and development quickly flickers in front of us.
The paintings in the exhibition depict a world where nothing is what it appears to be. The perspectives are distorted, the laws of gravity annulled and the light sources appears to shine both from the outside and from within the portrayed objects. With the same duality as in the use of the title, Carl Hammoud experiments with the concepts of time, memory, variability and reconstruction. Topics where the research is as important as the answers.
In Reconstruction Hammoud recreates one of his own works from 2001 with a method similar to the one used at crime scenes - a staging of events that allows an accurate review in hindsight. The reconstruction of the work, which is originally painted from a pre-nine-eleven photo of a New York view, creates a kind of extended time span where every brushstroke, explanation and repetition displaces the moment towards an eternity. Ex post Facto shows a scene that has collapsed completely, perhaps due to tropical storms, hurricanes or earthquakes. But the work shows no sky or earth, no growths or stones. Only manufactured objects placed in front of a light source, as if on a light table, where the catastrophe is traced to become an aesthetically rhyming composition. The trilogy Lifetime Achievement, exhibited in the third room in the gallery, describes the artistic process and it's conditions. An epilogue where the borders between creation, time and reality are completely erased.