Ever the artist to keep his viewers on their toes, David Hammons’s tarp paintings touch on the artist’s willingness to critique the very institutions that have brought him success and the legacies that remain deeply embedded within art history. Executed in 2017, Untitled is a recent example from this series, which began in 2007 and remains ongoing. In these works, painterly canvases are shrouded in mystery behind tarps, blankets, swaths of fabric, or other materials Hammons finds on the street. In Untitled, energetic strokes of blues, pinks, greens, browns, and oranges peer out from the corners of the canvas. Yet, the full composition is blocked from view by the blue-green plastic tarp tied precariously together with a yellow string directly in the center of the viewer’s field of vision. 

Historically speaking, in twentieth-century art, abstraction has been viewed as a container of a universal meaning, a promise of some transcendence; if a viewer only concentrates hard enough, there will be the reward of a moment of sudden, intuitive understanding. By affixing the tarp to the canvas, Hammons’s penchant for cerebral mind games shines through as he turns this long-held expectation on its head: he asks the viewer to search, knowing they will find nothing. Or at least, not the full picture. In doing so, Hammons places the gestural language of Abstract Expressionism within the conceptual framework of the readymade. Moreover, Hammons calls in other art historical precedents to add layers of nuance, such as the blending of boundaries between painting and sculpture seen in the work of Robert Rauschenberg, or the use of tarp and other quotidian found materials employed by Arte Povera artists such as Alberto Burri.