Lewis Hammond: Painting as Poetic Resistance

Among the three projects launching the new season at Fondazione ICA Milano, the spotlight falls on the first Italian solo exhibition of Lewis Hammond. The British artist, now based between Berlin and London, transforms the foundation’s ground floor into a mental landscape: a sequence of twenty paintings created between 2024 and 2025 and a series of architectural interventions that rewrite the exhibition space, inviting visitors into a truly immersive experience. Hammond draws on the great European painting tradition to speak to our present, suspended between global crises and new forms of spirituality. His figures, often disoriented and transformed, inhabit visionary settings where faith is not a religious dogma but a transformative social force. Where do we place our hope today? The question runs through every canvas, evoking trust and fear, a longing for community and the need for self-identification. With a palette that alternates dramatic chiaroscuro and suspended details, Hammond builds a parallel world of symbols and double meanings that reflects the anxieties and tensions of our time. In Milan, painting becomes an act of poetic resistance, offering viewers the fragile yet vital power of hope.