Michael Hambouz

Michael Hambouz (b. Niles, Michigan, 1977) is a multidisciplinary artist, multi-instrumentalist musician, and independent curator based in Brooklyn, NY. Hambouz received a B.A. in painting and sculpture with a minor in video from Antioch College in Yellow Springs, OH, and has been awarded a fellowship by The Studios at Mass MoCA in North Adams, MA, and two residencies with Wassaic Project in upstate New York.

Solo/two-person exhibitions include Elijah Wheat Showroom (Newburgh, NY), Spring/Break Art Show (NYC), Moore College of Art (Philadelphia, PA), Neighbors (NYC), chashama (NYC), Kayrock (NYC), Troutbeck (Amenia, NY), The Krasl Art Center (St. Joseph, MI), 3S Artspace (Portsmouth, NH), Future Fairs with Talia Levitt (NYC), Brooklyn Academy of Music with Michael O’Shea (NYC), and a 20-year survey exhibition at alma mater Antioch College (Yellow Springs, OH) in 2018.

Select group exhibitions include The National Arts Club (NYC), Club Rhubarb (NYC), Deanna Evans Projects (NYC), Andrew Edlin Gallery (NYC), IPCNY (NYC), Wassaic Project (Wassaic, NY), Standard Space (Sharon, CT), Dominique Gallery (Los Angeles, CA), Northern-Southern (Austin, TX), Eve Leibe Gallery (London, UK), and The Centre for Contemporary Printmaking (Bangor, N. Ireland).

His work has been featured in Artnet News, The New York Times, Design Milk, Hyperallergic, Two Coats of Paint, and Vice among others, and can be seen in the public collections of Antioch College, Fidelity Corporate Collection, Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center, Niles History Center, and NYU Langone Medical Center.


Artist Statement

Hambouz creates chromaesthesia-influenced works, channeling dimension and color from the guidance of music/audio, to process bouts of loss and reflections on life in the rural Midwest, New York City, and in the cybersphere as a first-generation Palestinian-American. Experimenting freely with mediums, he encourages unexpected results and mutations in compositional form to bloom in the studio, resulting in conceptually abstracted paintings and prints, intricate layered paper cutouts, sculpture, drawings, and animations.

Hambouz’s latest series of geometric relief paintings look to traits found in nature and spatial tension found in architectural forms to tease out themes of generational trauma and symbolic self-transformation.


www.michaelhambouz.com