The Charles Cowles Gallery is pleased to present an exhibition of RICHARD HAMILTON prints dating from 1968-1998. HAMILTON's work is a veritable lexicon of printmaking techniques. While he revels in the effects each process achieves, the use of these often antiquated and even recently extinct print methods, like collotype and heliogravure, is no small part of his oeuvre. His career is marked by a desire to record and disseminate. Swingeing London, his iconic recasting of a newspaper photo of Robert Fraser and Mick Jagger handcuffed after their arrest for drug possession, makes the event indelible in the often ephemeral public consciousness.
HAMILTON's body of work is characterized by a unifying ideology of experimentation rather than an identifiable personal style. He allows the keenly perceived subject to dictate his working method. In this he harks to James Joyce, whose writing toyed with many influences, not letting any one approach overwhelm the text exclusively. Included in this exhibition are several prints HAMILTON has created in an ongoing illustration of Joyce's Ulysses.
Widely recognized as the first Pop artist, HAMILTON is of the British generation who lived through the deprivations of WWII to be then inundated by American images of luxury and excess in the 1950s. His approach to popular culture is marked by observation of, not participation in, the consumerism that marked the postwar era. His work neither fully celebrates nor condemns the commodification of every aspect of life as seen in American cinema and television.
HAMILTON's works are in the collections of the Brooklyn Museum of Art, the Tate Gallery in London, the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York, and the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden at the Smithsonian Institution in Washington.
The exhibition will be on view at the Charles Cowles Gallery's new location at 537 West 24th Street, between 10th and 11th Avenues in Chelsea. In June, hours are 10am to 6pm, Tuesday through Saturday. In July, hours are 10am to 5 pm, Monday through Friday.