Frederick Hammersley //

Frederick Hammersley (1919-2009) spent most of his career in the Los Angeles area working as a painter and teacher. He is closely associated with the hard-edge abstraction painting style of the Abstract Classicists of southern California.

Hammersley's reputaton as a painter began in 1948 when one of his small paintings was accepted into an annual exhibition at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. Then in 1958, several of his works were included in a traveling exhibition called Four Abstract Classicists,organized by the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. Hammersley, and his fellow painters Lorser Feitelson, Karl Benjamin, and John McLaughlin, were dubbed the "hard-edged painters," which consisted of flat, coloured geometric shapes that had a sharper contrast to the more popular Abstract Expressionism. The label stuck and in the mid 1970s, Hammersley submitted several works of art for a show calledL.A. Hard Edge - the 50s and 70s in Los Angeles.

My Opinions:

I really quite like Frederick's work. I like the simple and clean elegance of his paintings, I also like that to me this is quite minimalist. I like how gridded this form of work is, I like the sets of squares are in the corners of the work.