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Art News:
Alan Cristea
Gallery
You are invited to the private view of
Richard Hamilton: Shit and
Flowers
Wednesday 26 May,
6-8pm
Alan Cristea Gallery, 31 & 34 Cork Street, London W1S
3NU
RSVP:
julia@theresasimon.com
PRESS
RELEASE
The Alan Cristea
Gallery
RICHARD
HAMILTON
Shit and
Flowers
27
May – 3 July
2010
Private view:
26 May
6-8pm
“Hamilton has a surgical understanding of the zeitgeist, an umbilical
connection to his times that allows him simultaneously to participate in them
and step back from them, to evaluate them while he lives them. [He] was the
first to understand the dynamics of the media. The first to understand the
consumer revolution. The first to acknowledge the unstoppable power of the
image.’
Waldemar Januszczak, The Sunday Times, 7 March
2010
Richard Hamilton returns to his ‘scatalogical period’ to curate
Shit and Flowers, an exhibition of his own work from the 1970s at the
Alan Cristea Gallery from 27 May.
The selected works in the exhibition will include paintings, drawings, collages,
etchings, lithographs, collotypes, stage proofs and trial proofs loaned from the
artist’s own
collection.
A set of vintage postcards depicting some locals squatting, with their trousers
down, in the Pyrenees countryside was the starting point for Hamilton to create
this extraordinary
series.
He was further inspired by a then new advertising campaign for Andrex toilet
tissue by J Walter Thompson. Reminiscent of paintings by Watteau or
Boucher, they portrayed the new ‘shades’ of paper in a lush rural
setting with women in floating garments holding pieces of appropriately coloured
fabric. The ‘Shit and Flowers’ motif was born – a
subject that Hamilton studied and revisited for much of the decade. In
making the work, he intentionally and wholeheartedly immersed himself in a
‘world of schmaltz’.
Although Hamilton worked in the aesthetic tradition of great artists such as
Cézanne and Picasso, he was continuously drawn to the contemporary world
of advertising and design and to the Duchampian rejection of painting. In
taking these images of flowers and landscapes from one world (which had, in
turn, been borrowed from art history) and returning them to the world of fine
art, he was making an ironic commentary on the co-existence, and in some senses
interdependence, of these two worlds. Hamilton continues to wrestle with the
language of painting, and all it stands for, to the present
day.
Notes to
Editors
Richard Hamilton was born in 1922 in London. His contribution to the field
of contemporary art is unsurpassed. His collage of 1956 entitled Just what is
it that makes today's homes so different, so appealing? is widely
acknowledged as one of the first pieces of ‘Pop Art', and his written
definition of what ‘pop' is, laid the ground for the whole international
movement. Since then his work, both in painting and printmaking, has
consistently challenged and broken boundaries and he is considered to be one of
the most important artists working today. His exhibition, Modern Moral
Matters runs at the Serpentine Gallery, London until 25 April
2010.
Alan Cristea has been working with Richard Hamilton
since 1977 and the Alan Cristea Gallery is the exclusive distributor of his
prints worldwide. This exhibition will be accompanied by an illustrated
catalogue which includes an extract from the artist’s forthcoming, as yet
unfinished, autobiography.
The Alan Cristea Gallery is the largest dealer and publisher of 20th-century and
contemporary prints in Europe, publishing works by the very best international
artists as well as regularly showing paintings, works on paper, ceramics,
sculpture and
installations.
Press
information Julia Huff - Theresa Simon & Partners
Ltd
020 7734 4800 – 07708 695 997 - julia@theresasimon.com
Images: www.theresasimon.com/press -
enter your details and select ‘Alan Cristea Gallery: Richard
Hamilton’
Alan Cristea Gallery open 10am-5.30pm Mon-Fri,
11am-2pm
Sat
31 & 34 Cork Street, London W1S 3NU 020 7439 1866
info@alancristea.com
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