C'naan Hamburger is On The Verge
C'naan Hamburger's first solo exhibit goes deep into urban landscapes and beyond.
Urban landscapes are an inherent part of C'naan Hamburger. The former professional skateboarder-turned-painter has used the language of street architecture to inform many aspects of her life and art. Space, the performativity of the body, the process of painting, and exploring, are just some of the themes that Hamburger touches on in her first ever solo show at Charles Moffett Gallery in TriBeCa.
Hamburger, who is a graduate of both the famed School of the Museum of Fine Arts at Tufts University, most recently, Hunter's MFA program in 2023, has come into her own as an artist. In her current exhibit, Vanitas which is on view until 4/20/24, Hamburger leverages the process of egg tempera to consider cityscapes, gentrification, urban decay, and art history in funny, complicated compositions. They are meticulously executed and the show includes both paintings, drawings, and a beautiful English porcelain piece. What strikes me about the work is the larger conversation Hamburger is having that defies artistic mediums, historical periods, and how the body is activated in these works in exciting and unexpected ways. A little Sophie Calle and Odd Nerdrum rolled into Elizabeth Peyton-esque pop culture references, Hamburger's work is simultaneously familiar and while also charting new territory. I recently spoke to Hamburger about her artistic practice, where she thinks performance comes into her work, and how she is handling the recent attention surrounding her work.
C'naan Hamburger, Vanitas, 2023. Egg tempera, pigment and ground Manhattan Schist on panel. Image courtesy of Charles Moffett Gallery.
Anni Irish: You graduated from Hunter's MFA in 2023, and currently have your first solo show up at Charles Moffett Gallery in TriBeCa that has started to garner some attention. What has that experience been like for you?
C’naan Hamburger: It’s been a bit of a shock to the system to navigate a new terrain…but finding that what I make is appreciated has been profoundly moving. In short, it is exciting. I love making art, but I’ve only ever been engrossed in the art-making process and art history, without showing. Indeed, at times, I have thought I never would show it. Additionally, making art has for some time been on the outskirts of my life because of obligations, work, family, etc.
AI: This exhibit is incredibly impressive and mature for a first solo show and each work is like a present wrapped within a present, almost like a Russian doll effect with the attention to care in the details in the execution of them, but also in the references. Can you talk to me about what your process for making art is like? And particularly what it was like making this work?
CH: My approach has been freeing. It is freeing because the paintings, drawings, and sculpture all make space for me to do many things at once. On the one hand my inspiration often specific and there is much detail. This is born of looking patiently and empathetically at others' art and time. It would be false for me to describe looking as an activation–perhaps closer to looking as a creative act? In turn, looking gives back. It breaks into my daily life- and is very much present in my day to day activities.
On the other hand much of my inspiration is invisible, personal, or fleeting thoughts which are impossible to relay. The whole life influences art or the opposite is a cliche.How I paint is as important to what I paint. This feedback loop between my intentions and the flow of the paint has freed me to see how painting has not been exhausted. I have found a way which doesn't grate against my sensibilities. By sensibilities I mean an accumulation of sorts.
C'naan Hamburger, Theatre Is The Domestication Of An Audience, 2023. Egg Tempera, pigment and ground steel construction plate on panel. Image courtesy of Charles Moffett Gallery.
AI: Where do you draw inspiration from?
CH: Generally from many places. For this show however, it is specific. I focused on the Dutch golden age, Breugel, American Regionalism, and Mondrian. Pieter de Hooch and Mondrian's compositions are many times identical. This realization truly gave me new eyes when looking at older art. Painting Class is a Mondrian composition, my painting titled Vanitas relies on Breugel’s Hunters in the Snow Imagining a contemporary vanitas picture is how I approached everything in this show.
American regionalism of the early 20th century holds a curious position through such a lens. It's impressive how quickly it began being held in contempt. The last decade or so has given rise to a re-examination of such opinions. Watching the ebbs and flow of such fashions falls quite neatly with the Vanitas theme.
AI: How has your painting practice changed over the last few years from undergrad and then having gone through an MFA?
CH: My time in Boston was really special. There were performance venues and programming happening all the time. Whether spontaneously or in organized ways (one was The Present Tense but there were so many). Noise shows and tapes with lots of collaged sounds were omnipresent.
Krzysztof Wodiczko was influencing all my friends. Pope.L was a regular visitor. I’d see Joan Jonas at lots of lectures and naturally was enamored and curious, leading me to read about her.
I tried to get Joe Gibbons to be a mentor or friend or simply tried to be around him. I wanted to make art like his. I took his class at MIT but the more I pushed the more he recoiled. At the time it felt like rejection, but I now see that this was still an influence and very much aligned with his ethos. Rejection as a useful pedagogical tool?
You know–I have only taken one proper painting class. It was sometime in 2014. Every art class I’ve ever taken has never been bound by the genre it is headlined under. This middle ground is how art institutions navigate their status as neither a trade school nor the humanities. This accumulation is essentially what we are taught.
Make what you will of that…choosing an ancient and notoriously tricky medium is not in any way some neat linear conclusion. Perhaps it is more aligned with a transgressive sensibility as it really goes against everything I was taught. Such a reaction is an accumulation as well.
C'naan Hamburger. Painting Class, 2023. Egg Tempera, pigment and ground NYC sidewalk on panel. Image courtesy of Charles Moffett Gallery.
AI: Your work is also very performative to me and has a very process-oriented approach with a very research based element. For example, you have spoken about how in many of these works, you also have incorporated specific detritus from the locations into the paint by mixing in bits of rust or pieces from wall paint that then become part of the painting in another way. Where is the line between performance and object for you in this body of work and in your practice in general?
CH: In performance there are certain tropes which are regularly covered…in this group of paintings the subject and the object are regularly interchangeable. Perhaps this usually is found under the rubric of performance? At this stage of artistic developments, such divisions are misleading.
In addition, much of what I scrape is usually abject. Suddenly, it is no longer detritus. While conceptually this move obviously plays with notions of value, in practice it is driving my process—adding the scrapped material to the egg binder alters the way the paint behaves.
In making this group of paintings, Pope.L’s crawl when scraping materials and Joan Jonas’ use of recording as an independent piece or a collaborator were recurring thoughts. Her recordings as an independent object have pushed such thinking about making a things. Truly allowing myself to paint with that approach. I have many impulses that do not fall neatly into painting, but unpacking this misconception is and has been for some time part of the medium.
AI: How would you describe your paintings to someone who isn't familiar with your work?
CH: Usually, when describing my art, I find myself explaining egg tempera and then explaining the foraged materials I add. That said, the other day, I was walking through the Vija Celmins show (for the 4th time), and I am embarrassed to admit I ended up trying to describe my painting Wall Power to the gallery tender (who was so nice and fun to talk to). You see, there is a little Celmins painting within my painting… I guess I wanted her to know about it and this was a maladroit attempt to get it to her?! Gosh, as I spell this out it's starting to feel like my Joe Gibbons anecdote!!
AI: What are you listening to currently in the studio? And What are you reading right now?
CH: To be perfectly honest—since starting to show, my brain has become so noisy that, as I make something, I forget even to put on music! So at the moment, I am simply trying to sort out my thoughts.
As for reading, I LOVE biographies and history. It is so gratifying to conspire with an author to unearth another’s inner life or the past. I wish in real life I could get to know someone (or a time) so fully and with such certainty.
I just downed(this keeps changing to downloaded? But I mean downing a 40) two Benjamin Moser books. First, The Upside Down World. The combination of his own life’s weirding path and a handful of mini biographies from The Dutch Golden Age. It had a profound effect on me. The possibility of such asymmetry in one’s existence is outwardly a small observation-but the details of it are meaningful still. I couldn’t get enough so I then read his Susan Sontag biography. I am still feeling the aftershock of both.
AI: What projects do you have coming up?
CH: I’m currently preparing new panels. This might seem topsy turvy but with egg tempera the most challenging part is getting the gessoing right. I was thinking of Sontag as I was preparing the gesso (bear with me here)…One uses rabbit skin glue, which is pungent— Benjamin Moser described her love of eating rotten things. Her culinary habits sought to confront notions of disgust. It tickled me to imagine her and I enjoying the smell of the rabbit skin soaking.
Vanitas is on view at Charles Moffett Gallery through 4/20/24.