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 works.

The installations, prints and paintings on view take international politics, riots, terrorist acts and war as their subject matter, examining 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.

Hamilton, born in 1922, was a leading instigator of Pop Art in Britain and a key member of the Independent Group, formed in the 1950s by a group of artists and writers at London’s Institute of Contemporary Arts. Retrospective exhibitions of his work have been held in the UK at the Hanover Gallery (1964) and Tate Gallery (1970 and 1992). Hamilton was Britain’s representative at the 1993 Venice Biennale.

INFO:
3 March – 25 April 2010
Serpentine Gallery
Kensington Gardens
London W2 3XA
020 7402 6075