Richard Hamilton & My Art About Art

The artist Richard Hamilton has been an inspirational favourite of mine since seeing some of his work (as a 17 year old) on show at Newcastle University circa 1970.  Following Hamilton's death in 2011, Tate Modern staged a comprehensive retrospective of his work in 2014. Regarded by many as the father of the British version of Pop Art, the exhibition showed Hamilton to have been a stand out thinker, collaborator, educationalist and highly skilled innovative image maker... constantly pondering on what the art of 'today' should/could be about.

The artworks in the following link (made by me during the past year) are a kind of tribute to Richard Hamilton's spirit, may he RIP: Richard Hamilton related Blog + images Niume

Notes

Hamilton was born in London. He was educated at the Royal Academy Schools from 1938 to 1940, then studied engineering draughtsmanship at a Government Training Centre in 1940, then worked as a 'jig and tool' designer. He returned in 1946 to the Royal Academy Schools, from which he was expelled for 'not profiting from the instruction being given in the painting school' (Hamilton, p.10), then attended the Slade School of Art from 1948 to 1951.

Hamilton was a member of the Independent Group, formed in the 1950s by a group of artists and writers at the Institute of Contemporary Arts, whose symposiums contributed to the development of Pop art in Britain. He was one of the prime practitioners of the critic Lawrence Alloway's theory of a 'fine/pop art continuum'. Hamilton interpreted this as meaning that 'all art is equal - there was no hierarchy of value. Elvis was to one side of a long line while Picasso was strung out on the other side ... TV is neither less nor more legitimate an influence than, for example, is New York Abstract Expressionism' (Hamilton, p.31).Hamilton taught at the London Central School of Arts and Crafts and University of Newcastle upon Tyne; he gave up teaching full-time in 1966. He designed a typographic version of Duchamp's Green Box, published in 1960, and in 1965-6, with Duchamp's guidance, reconstructed Duchamp's The Bride Stripped Bare by her Bachelors, Even (The Large Glass) (Tate Gallery T02011). Keen to embrace certain types of technology within his art, Hamilton began creating computer-generated works in the 1980s. He has had a long career as a print-maker, and in 1983 won the World Print Council Award. In 1991 he married the artist Rita Donagh. Retrospective exhibitions of Hamilton's work have been held at the Hanover Gallery, 1964, the Tate Gallery, 1970 and 1992, and abroad. He was Britain's representative at the 1993 Venice Biennale.

The above text was sourced from the Tate Modern website.