David Hammons

This monograph on David Hammons provides critical insight into the elusive mind of an artist who has consistently wrong footed the art establishment. An extended essay by acclaimed poet, novelist and playwright, Ben Okri, explores Hammons's critical approach to the cult of artistic personality, contrasting the artist's cool indifference to his own self-image with classical and art historical biographies of great painters, from Pliny the Elder to Giorgio Vasari. Leading with a series of stills from Phat Free (1995/1999), Hammons's only known video work, the publication documents the artist's output from his body prints to his explicit strategies of opacity and disguise. It also invites a point of comparison between Agnes Martin's Untitled #9, 1999, a late work in white and pale primary colours that was included in Hammons's 2014 exhibition at White Cube Mason's Yard. Designed by (Studio) Jonathan Hares, the monograph spaces out its images at a rhythm in keeping with Hammons's judicious artistic output.