Aydin Hamami

One for sorrow, two for joy...

April 24 – May 16, 2026

Mixed media

Artist Statement

How do we measure loss? Or longing? What do we owe those who have left us when we have been left behind?

As an artist, I address the role of the ephemeral at a moment when the handmade feels poised on the brink of obscurity. In a world increasingly shaped by automation, the need for intimacy, imperfection, and personal connection grows stronger. My works are objects born of this need, things shaped by the fleeting and the fragile. They explore how the marks we leave and the objects we touch carry the evidence of our presence on earth, however brief.

I work with that which has already lived a life - found cloth, bed linens, and fragments of domestic fabric marked by the familiarity of touch, records of memory. These surfaces become the underpinning of my paintings, the physical support for oil, ink, patina, wax, and time. Through these interventions, the familiar becomes subtly alien. Each work feels like an alchemical act, a transformation of discarded matter into something luminous, bodily, tender, and present.

The works in One for Sorrow exist somewhere between art-object and talisman, not fully paintings, and maybe drifting toward arcane utility. They are meditations on personage, grief, loss, and inevitability.

There is a comfort in the stillness of loss that we are reluctant to explore. These pieces begin to.