David Hammons — Exhibition Invitation Card, L&M Arts, New York, 2011

Exhibition invitation postcard
21 × 14.8 cm
Offset print on card stock; black-and-white typography to recto and verso
Published by L&M Arts, New York
Exhibition dates: January 26 – February 26, 2011
Condition: very good; light handling wear and faint surface marks consistent with storage and age

Issued for a 2011 solo exhibition by David Hammons at L&M Arts, New York. The invitation reduces itself almost completely to a name. White letters against black ground; date and venue on the reverse. No image, no explanatory text, no secondary information. The design follows a familiar Hammons strategy: withholding rather than announcing.

The exhibition itself marked Hammons's first presentation of new work since his earlier 2007 project at L&M and centred on large paintings and mixed-media works that partially concealed their own images beneath tarps, blankets, and weathered coverings. Beneath these surfaces viewers encountered fragments of abstraction — painting simultaneously revealed and denied. Critics frequently described the exhibition as operating between seduction and obstruction: beauty present but deliberately interrupted.

The works pushed forward concerns already active throughout Hammons's practice. Since the body prints of the late 1960s, snowball sales, found objects, bottle caps, hair pieces, basketball imagery, and street interventions, Hammons repeatedly positioned meaning at the edges of visibility. In these 2011 works, concealment itself became material. A painting remained present physically while refusing complete access.

As an object, the invitation behaves similarly. It withholds almost everything except a name. Read through a New Rare register, the card functions less as documentation than as a compressed proposition: the artist's name acting as image, announcement, and object simultaneously.

Original period item.