Artists

Lewis Hammond

Press release

Fondazione ICA Milano presents the exhibition Black Milk by British artist Lewis Hammond (United Kingdom, 1987), curated by Chiara Nuzzi. On view from Friday, September 26 to Saturday, November 8, 2025, alongside solo exhibitions by Oliver Osborne on the first floor and Isabella Costabile in the project room, Black Milk is the artist’s first solo show in an Italian institution and unfolds in the large ground-floor hall of the institution. The history of painting and the relationship with faith—conceived in its transformative and social sense—are the central themes around which Hammond’s paintings take shape, most of which were conceived specifically for the exhibition between 2024 and 2025. The works infuse the space with visionary and surreal atmospheres: dark colors, distorted bodies, and formal solutions suspended between corporeal and emotional fragility are accompanied by themes such as motherhood, religion, hope, and individualism. As curator Chiara Nuzzi explains: “Hammond’s painterly research is deeply influenced by the crises of the present and by the Western pictorial tradition. In a time marked by uncertainty, fear, and inequality, the artist projects into his paintings the psychological, social, and collective conditions that define us. The canvases thus become projection surfaces, open spaces that the public can inhabit with their emotions, thoughts, and personal experiences—completing the meaning of the work.” Several paintings feature explicit references to Christian iconography: from the Agnus Dei in Fulcrum (2024) to the rabbit in Untitled (2025). Often portrayed alone, Hammond’s figures appear in a reflective and transcendental state, as in Empty Altar (2025), opening up a meditation on individualism, a central theme in the artist’s recent work. The exhibition is developed in the Foundation’s ground-floor hall, where the artist has intervened with structural alterations that actively contribute to influence the emotional perception of the works. Two partition walls disrupt the spatial and narrative linearity, while the colors and lighting amplify the emotional impact of the canvases, suggesting an introspective and psychological reading. The exhibition title, Black Milk, originates from the sense of anguish and suspended expectation that envelops the environments, bodies, gestures, and expressions in Hammond’s paintings. The curator further explains: “Black Milk refers to the complexity of the human condition and to the awareness that at some point in life affects each of us: on one side, darkness, the fear of emptiness and the unknown; on the other, the symbol of a nourishing and natural element—milk—which alludes to hope, renewal, and change.” Whether it is faith in people, social or romantic trust, or fear and hope, the artist places at the heart of his research an open question: What do we place our hope in today? A feeling that touches not only personal intimacy but also social, political, and economic systems. How and in what does one choose to place trust? And what does it mean to lose faith and hope?