Hammer Museum

Hammer Projects: Math Bass

29 Sep 2018 - 10 Feb 2019

Hammer Projects: Math Bass, installation view
Hammer Museum, Los Angeles
Photo: Brian Forrest
HAMMER PROJECTS: MATH BASS
29 September 2018 – 10 February 2019

Organized by Connie Butler, chief curator, with Vanessa Arizmendi, curatorial assistant

Los Angeles-based artist Math Bass creates a site-specific mural for the Hammer’s lobby wall.

Working across a range of media, including painting and sculpture, Math Bass employs a distinctive language of abstract, brightly colored shapes and images to explore notions of multiplicity. Her stylized forms, from bones doubling as speech bubbles to teeth resembling a set of stairs leading into a crocodile’s mouth, are rendered deliberately ambiguous and often installed to mirror each other across two and three-dimensional works. Playing with bodily and architectural scale for the Hammer Museum’s lobby wall, Bass invites the viewer to inhabit a liminal space where definition and hierarchy are playfully subverted to allow for new possibilities of experience.