Jane Hammond @ Berggruen Gallery, San Francisco - 'Chocolate Cosmos, String of Pearls' Exhibition

Jane Hammond

Chocolate Cosmos, String of Pearls

Berggruen Gallery, San Francisco

October 23, 2025 – January 8, 2026

Berggruen Gallery presents Chocolate Cosmos, String of Pearls, an exhibition of new work by New York–based artist JANE HAMMOND. This exhibition marks the gallery's third solo exhibition with the artist.

Chocolate Cosmos, String of Pearls features mixed-media botanical assemblages composed of images acquired through a rigorous process of research and collection, yet arranged improvisationally. Hammond's hyper-detailed compositions probe the relationships between ecology, observation, and knowledge. Through a system of images shaped by the poetics of language, Jane Hammond produces lavish arrangements of vivid and fantastical forms drawn from the natural world. Using several printmaking techniques such as relief printing and linocut, as well as combining painting and drawing, Hammond’s compositions employ myriad methodologies. Jane Hammond often prints from hand-made plates on painted and collaged grounds.

Jane Hammond’s works draw on both found and personal photographs she has collected over many years. She recontextualizes these images, often dramatically altering color, scale, and resolution, and builds her arrangements based on symbolic and physical associations. Her botanical arrangements brim with flora and fauna from disparate species across continents and temporalities, resulting in bouquets that exist outside the realm of possibility. While beautiful and meticulously arranged, these are not traditional botanicals. Hammond’s works—made up of both living and extinct flora and fauna—present a plentitude both ravishing and increasingly threatened by ecological destruction.

Shaped by the aesthetics of post-minimalism in 1970s New York, Jane Hammond avoided botanical subjects for decades, though an interest in the natural world was a throughline in her childhood, education, and later life. Of the work in Chocolate Cosmos, String of Pearls, Jane Hammond has said: “It’s a different enterprise to make these botanicals now than it would have been 30 years ago because the environment from which all this plentitude emanates is now intensely jeopardized."

Jane Hammond also has a keen interest in the history of material culture. She mines the traditions of ceramics, glass, and metalwork across the globe for her containers, as well as the world of artisanal papermaking for the handmade grounds she crafts for each piece. These unique compositions are made of many heterogeneous and often conflicting elements, yet ultimately resolve harmoniously. Hammond's rigorous compositional process involves constant readjustments of placement, scale, and color until she achieves a desired “harmony built from tension and difference.” These tensions impart power and vitality to their final resolution. Hammond's works play with language, allegory, and games to invite the viewer into a mythical world blooming with an encyclopedic collection of images, where edification comes from searching and surprise.

Jane Hammond was born in 1950 in Bridgeport, CT. She received her B.A. from Mount Holyoke College in 1972, an MFA from Arizona State University in 1974, and a second MFA from the University of Wisconsin–Madison in 1977. Her work is in the permanent collections of over eighty museums, including the National Gallery of Art, SFMOMA, the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and the Museum of Modern Art. In 2019, she was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship. Her work has been featured in The New York Times, ARTnews, Art in America, and more. Jane Hammond currently lives and works in New York City.

Jane Hammond’s forthcoming publication, Chocolate Cosmos, String of Pearls, will be released in spring 2026.

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Berggruen Gallery also presents Interiors, a group exhibition of paintings and works on paper depicting interior spaces. The exhibition is on view through January 8, 2026.

The works in Interiors reveal a range of artistic engagement with physical and psychological space. Drawing from distinct painterly vocabularies—realism, abstraction, and Bay Area Figuration—Interiors brings together diverse contemplations of space, light, and memory. Whether probing the spatial drama of the domestic—a place of routine, leisure, and introspection—or conveying architectural tropes such as windows, doorways, and hallways, Interiors offers various contemporary reflections on the inhabited worlds around us, both real and imagined. 

Exhibiting Artists: David Bates | Helen Berggruen | Dean Byington | Bruce Cohen | Nicasio Fernandez | Daniel Cabrillos Jacobsen | Raffi Kalenderian | JJ Manford | Rachel Simon Marino | Tom McKinley | Linda Pouliot | Jillian Shea | Gail Spaien | Seesha Takagishi | Anna Valdez | Lucy Williams | Paul Wonner

BERGGRUEN GALLERY

10 Hawthorne Street, San Francisco, CA 94105

www.berggruen.com

Jane Hammond @ Lyndsey Ingram, London - Natural Selection: New Botanical Collages

Jane Hammond

Natural Selection: New Botanical Collages

Lyndsey Ingram, London

10 May - 15 June 2018

Lyndsey Ingram presents the first London solo show of botanical collages by American artist, JANE HAMMOND (b. 1950), who combines printmaking techniques with painting, photography, found objects and digital elements to create one-of-a-kind large-scale collages that explore the infinite complexity of the natural and man-made worlds.

Timed to coincide with the Chelsea Flower Show and the Chelsea Fringe Festival, this exhibition of new work showcases Jane Hammond’s modern and disruptive approach to the historic tradition of botanical prints and the science of horticulture. Instead of seeking to record and classify plants, the artist creates imaginary tableaux: ‘Everything I make is a cocktail of fact and fiction – of things found out in the world, things I invent, and hybrids of the two.’

Some of Jane Hammond’s botanical collages contain specific themes. For example, in one piece, all of the plants are poisonous. Another features all of the stages of the Monarch butterfly and its food supply. All of the works contain imaginative attitudes toward colour, scale, form, and botany itself. ‘In the end, I’m looking for a bold unity that is built upon dissociation and tension, as well as harmony.’

Originally trained as a sculptor and ceramist, Jane Hammond has evolved her own technique of making these collages, first creating an elaborate collage for the ground itself, often with Japanese papers. Then the artist begins to arrange botanical elements already printed or drawn, painted and painstakingly cut out. She continues arranging, re-arranging, and swapping until the piece unifies. Then all the elements are glued exactly in place and pressed flat under blotters and stacks of books from her library.

‘I don’t like the uniformity of surface in traditional printmaking. I want something fresher, more varied and multi-lingual.’ Each collage combines handmade and digital imagery – linoleum blocks that are hand-carved, hand-printed and later hand-coloured, with photographs the artist has taken, in markets, gardens and flower shops – as well as found images drawn from the the world of colouring books, vintage handkerchiefs, wallpaper and textiles. While collage, printmaking and photography are separate media, for Hammond, all of them are inextricably bound together in her work and are essential to her vision of art: ‘I have an encyclopedic mind that scavenges for information and imagery, wherever I can find it.’

Jane Hammond is a passionate botanist and gained her love of plants at the side of her grandmother, who was an ambitious amateur gardener. ‘When I was six she made me memorise the Latin names of a hundred flowers.’

‘I entered the art world in the heydey of Minimalism – the era when less was more and flowers were verboten. It has taken me a long time to embrace and include this life-long interest in my practice. Looking closely at plants and birds one gains an understanding of taxonomic relationships and of the incredible complexity and variety of nature. My work embraces the fact that more is more – the infinite complexity of nature and our ability to make distinctions and associations in its contemplation – is a cause for celebration and an important part of what makes us human.’

Jane Hammond’s work is represented in the collections of major US museums, including MoMA, New York; the Albright-Knox Museum, New York; the Brooklyn Museum, the Baltimore Museum, the Corcoran Museum, Washington DC; de Young Museum, San Francisco; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago; National Gallery of Art, Washington DC, the Whitney Museum of American Art. Her work is also in the collections of the Bibliothèque Nationale in Paris and the Museo d’Arte Contemporaria, Mexico City.

LYNDSEY INGRAM

20 Bourdon Street, London W1K 3PL

www.lyndseyingram.com

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