john van hamersveld

Beyond the Wave

October 10 - November 25, 2026

Los Angeles, CA —CMAY Gallery is pleased to present Beyond the Wave, an exhibition examining John Van Hamersveld’s transformation of the wave from recognizable image into abstraction.

For more than six decades, Van Hamersveld has occupied a distinctive position within the visual culture of Southern California, moving between fine art, graphic design, music, surfing, printmaking, and public imagery. Rather than treating these areas as separate disciplines, his practice developed across them simultaneously. Paintings, posters, murals, prints, and commercial projects became parallel forms of image-making, connected by a consistent formal language.

In Beyond the Wave, the wave becomes a point of departure rather than simply a subject. Initially tied to the ocean and the culture of surfing, it gradually becomes a vehicle for investigating line, repetition, rhythm, contour, color, and spatial compression. As the image is reduced and reconfigured, representation gives way to structure. The wave becomes less an image of nature than an abstract system of movement.
This progression places Van Hamersveld’s work within a larger history of postwar Southern California art, where distinctions between fine art, design, photography, architecture, music, and popular culture were often unusually fluid. The region produced artists who drew as readily from the street, the beach, advertising, automobiles, record culture, and the built environment as from traditional art-historical sources.

Van Hamersveld was both a participant in and a contributor to this cultural transformation. The Southern California culture of which he was a part would become internationally influential through surfing, skateboarding, music, graphic design, fashion, photography, and youth culture. Images and attitudes that emerged from Los Angeles and the California coast circulated globally, shaping not only how Southern California was perceived, but how successive generations of artists and designers approached image-making.

Van Hamersveld’s contribution to that history lies in the clarity and consistency of his visual structure. Strong contours, flattened forms, compressed space, repeated lines, and an emphatic sense of movement recur throughout his work regardless of subject. These elements function as a visual syntax, making a Van Hamersveld image immediately recognizable.

His influence can be seen in generations of artists working across the boundaries of fine art and popular culture, including Shepard Fairey, Chaz Bojórquez, Dave Tourjé, Richard Duardo, and Craig Stecyk. More broadly, his work belongs to a Southern California visual tradition whose influence has extended far beyond the region itself.

The works in Beyond the Wave reveal how seamlessly Van Hamersveld moves between these parallel art worlds. A wave developed for a surf-related commission and an abstract work made within his studio practice share the same underlying language of line, form, rhythm, and movement. As the wave is simplified and transformed, its original subject recedes and abstraction emerges without rupture.

In this transition, Van Hamersveld connects the visual culture of surfing and commercial design to a broader history of abstraction. His work demonstrates that these worlds were never separate. They are joined by a distinctive artistic language that has remained remarkably consistent across decades, media, and contexts—and that makes his work immediately recognizable as his own.