Tamarind Institute is proud to present Against the Plane: Experimental Lithography at Tamarind, guest-curated by Parrish Art Museum Associate Curator Scout Hutchinson with Tamarind Gallery Director Marissa Fassano.
During her 2024 residency at Tamarind, artist Harmony Hammond created a number of editions that draw on her process-based approach to painting. Featuring torn paper and coats of adhesive, the prints reveal the artist’s longstanding interest in texture, materiality, and layers—qualities not often associated with lithography. “What’s difficult for me with lithography, of course, is that it’s planographic—that’s the nature of it,” Hammond explains. “And different artists, myself being one, we mess with that, we play with it, we resist it. There’s a kind of…tension, we hope, an energy that comes from that…. In painting, I know my way … In lithography, I’m a lost soul. That’s what interests me.”
In the spirit of Hammond’s “lost soul” approach to lithography, this exhibition presents Tamarind prints by artists who resist, rather than adhere to, lithography’s nature. Though instrumental to each of these prints, the traditional lithographic process of reproducing images and text from a flat printing surface is not readily apparent in the final works. Instead, the artists challenge the conventions of lithography, employing techniques from collage, textiles, sculpture, and monoprinting.
Working closely with Tamarind printers, the artists featured developed inventive ways of exploring the material and conceptual concerns of their broader practice within the realm of lithography, creating impressions that live at the edges of the medium. The effect is a reciprocal expansion, revealing how Tamarind—a printshop that has encouraged artists to experiment in lithography since 1960—has also been a place where the bounds of lithography are tested and pushed.
