Richard Hamilton: ‘Shock and awe’
2007-2008
200×100 cm.
©2010 – Richard Hamilton
Richard Hamilton: – Modern Moral Matters
To start its 40th anniversary year, the Serpentine Gallery presents Richard Hamilton: Modern Moral Matters, a solo exhibition by one of the world’s most respected living artists – 3 March – 25 April 2010
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Source: Serpentine Gallery
Richard Hamilton has embraced many different media since the 1950s, including painting, printmaking, installation, typography and industrial design. This major exhibition will reassess the nature of the British artist’s pioneering contribution, focusing on Hamilton’s political, or ‘protest’, works.
The installations, prints and paintings on view take international politics, riots, terrorist acts and war, including the conflict in Northern Ireland and the Iraq wars, as their subject matter. The works examine how these conflicts are represented by the media, including via television and the internet.
Hamilton has seen great changes in communication technologies throughout his working life. In 1969, he noted that: “In the Fifties we became more aware of the possibility of seeing the whole world, at once, through the great visual matrix that surrounds us, a synthetic ‘instant’ view. Cinema, television, magazines, newspapers flooded the artist with a total landscape.”
Through its fragmentation of images, manipulation of space and reference to different styles and genres, Hamilton’s work interrogates the representations that surround us. Yet his analysis of the image is counterbalanced by an underlying, allegoric lyricism, through which he reinvigorates the genres of portraiture and history painting.
This survey of Hamilton’s political works also explores in depth the artist’s working processes and the varied ways he uses photographic material. It investigates his continued interest in creating multiples of a single, iconic image as both a mirror and a critique of the visual overload created by the media.
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