The Art Dealers Association of America: C'naan Hamburger

For its inaugural participation at The Art Show, Charles Moffett is pleased to present new works by New York-based artist C’naan Hamburger. This presentation follows the recent announcement of Hamburger’s representation with the gallery and builds upon the gallery’s spring 2024 exhibition Vanitas, the artist’s celebrated solo debut in New York. As Hamburger earned her MFA at Hunter College (Winter 2024), she developed a distinctive use of egg tempera on wood panels. Painting in minute brushstrokes of remarkable precision, the artist’s compositions leverage the ancient technique of egg tempera and the traditional genre of landscape painting to create contemporary vanitas pictures, which approach the seeming mundanity of contemporary urban life with reverence and watchful attention.

A world champion skateboarder in her youth, the artist’s prevailing love of skateboarding and her experience as an outdoor educator permeate her works.  She runs her astute eye and meticulous hand through the New York City landscape — its streets, sidewalks, rooftops, and parks. For her, these sites, their paving, landscaping, and thin layers of fleeting surface improvements symbolize our constant and failing masking of the past, and a simultaneous, insistent refusal to accept our own, inevitable disintegration. In her solo exhibition at Charles Moffett earlier this year, the artist zeroed in on the omnipresent, yet inevitably futile attempts at city maintenance — the painting of yellow caution lines on the steps descending to the subway, the resodding of a small patch of park lawn, discarded traffic law signs, and piles of orange-striped ConEd barriers crowding a sidewalk. The portrayal of these quiet city scenes is never an assessment of the value of the work and labor itself, but rather an interrogation of what unspoken urges and fears that work strives to bury within us.

At The Art Show 2024, Charles Moffett will present Hamburger’s new series of works, which builds upon the previous show by largely examining a persistent and particular slice of today’s city experience: the contemporary consumer economy in which thousands of pre-ordered goods are delivered upon doorsteps daily. In her new paintings, Hamburger portrays the human pauses during such transit; the complex web of systems laid upon continuously maintained roads that, amazingly, gets packages to myriad destinations. That web includes all manner of transportation, receptacles, and people, from UPS trucks to bike trolleys, cardboard boxes to recycled-plastic Amazon bags, and the delivery personnel to Uptown doormen. All of this has become a vast and integral part of New York City's circulatory system.

Hamburger’s work is as much a palimpsest as the repeatedly repaired city she depicts. Her compositions forage through the history of the landscape genre. This new series draws on compositional tropes found in as diverse sources as Flemish annunciation scenes, Sienese cityscapes, perspectival studies, Indian Mughal paintings, American Figuration, and Piet Mondrian. She paints in layers of egg tempera, exploiting how they interact. A third or fourth layer of brush strokes can be laid down in a way that lifts earlier pigment, leaving behind the ghost of the previous application of paint, a phenomenon the artist views as an expression of regret.

Rather than approaching the genre of landscape painting as a means of producing faithful reproductions of the sites that inspire them, Hamburger intentionally plays with the malleability of the landscape, asserting that much is not seen. In this spirit, she often scrapes material from the surfaces she portrays, grinds it, and utilizes it as pigment for her refined brushstrokes. She thereby goes beyond mere representation of structures and streetscapes to present their vulnerability and disintegration within the paintings themselves. 

C’naan Hamburger (b. 1984, Jerusalem, Israel; lives and works in New York, NY. MFA Painting Hunter College, 2024. BA, Tufts University, 2007.) Hamburger is the recipient of the Elizabeth Greenshields Foundation Grant in 2023 and 2022, and the AXA Art Prize honorable mention in 2023 and prize finalist in 2021. Her work has recently been exhibited by Kate Werble Gallery in New York, NY, and is held in the permanent collections of the Bartow-Pell Museum, Bronx, NY, and UMass Dartmouth, Claire T. Carney Library Archives and Special Collections. Hamburger has been an outdoor educator for over a dozen years. Before pursuing her artistic practice, she was a World Champion skateboarder, named best female skater of 2001 by Transworld Skateboard Magazine; and in 2000, she won the World Cup of Skateboarding and the Van’s Triple Crown in Women’s Street.