We are delighted to invite you to the exhibition and launch party of Hammer Chen: Light of Magic at Spike Print Studio.
Hammer Chen: Light of Magic
Free Entry
Launch Party: Friday 29 May, 6-9PM
Open: Saturday 30 & Sunday 31 May, 12-5PM
Light of Magic is an exhibition of copper photogravure prints by Hammer Chen exploring the quiet magic within everyday moments. Hammer Chen’s work is shaped by themes of memory and travel. Photogravure possesses a unique, almost archival quality, evoking a sense of nostalgia through near-cinematic imagery. Chen draws on this quality to explore the shift from documentation to personal perception. In 2025, Chen was awarded an Arts Council England DYCP grant to research non-toxic approaches to copper photogravure. This exhibition brings together the results of this research, where technical enquiry meets a more sustainable practice.
Celebrating artist printmakers who are technically and thematically pushing the possibilities of print, this is the first of our Spike Print Studio exhibitions coinciding with Spike Island's opening weekend. Spike Island are presenting their summer exhibitions, Tohé Commaret: Mijitas and Nancy Lupo: Several Chickens Later. Discover the most significant presentations of Commaret and Lupo’s works in the UK to date, as both present newly commissioned work at Spike Island this summer.
Two new moving image pieces from Commaret expand on her catalogue of short films that drift at the threshold between documentary and fiction, approaching social realities through magical realism. Rosa—a new work commissioned by Spike Island and realised as part of the PONTOPREIS MMK 2026—follows several women from different backgrounds, all living in the suburbs of Paris, whose lives become suddenly entangled through a secret diary. A corpus of newly commissioned sculptures from Lupo probe aspirations, ambiguities and material culture. The exhibition prolongs the reverie and the longing for domesticity, refusing a reality-check and looping back into wistful illusion. Although the mirage is tired, its feeble flame still somehow persists. These new works see Lupo playing with the scale and industrial grandeur of Spike Island’s galleries, evoking the fragility of our endeavours, and the futility of our fantasies. Find out more about Spike Island's summer exhibitions here.
Header Image: Hammer Chen, The Light Collector (2023), Copperplate Photogravure Etching