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Richard Hambleton, Untitled, 2006, oil, tinted varnish and gold leaf on steel, signed.

 

FOR 9/14

RICHARD HAMBLETON PAINTINGS AT WOODWARD GALLERY SEPT. 15 w/1 cut

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NEW YORK CITY — Woodward Gallery opens its fall art season with “The Beautiful Paintings” by Richard Hambleton, on view September 15–November 3. An opening reception will be Saturday, September 15, from 6 to 8 pm.

The paintings on exhibition at Woodward Gallery are gold or silver leaf paintings on metal, mirrors and canvas drenched with tinted varnish offering a combination of beauty and illusion.

Hambleton is the only surviving member of that historic coterie of the 1980s including his close friends Jean-Michel Basquiat, Keith Haring and Andy Warhol.

Hambleton is a conceptual artist and develops projects that are really only completed once people react to them. Hambleton has exhibited throughout Europe and has a strong following in Italy and Japan.

He has done a variety of public art going back to the early 1970s. From 1976–1979, he painted 620 murder victims with outlines around bodies in staged scenes often in areas of major cities around the globe designated as “low crime.” Headlines quickly proclaimed the effective realism of these tableaux and their effects on increasing urban paranoia.

In 1982, Hambleton painted standing, threatening strange Shadow Man© figures with black paint on the landscape of the darkest corners of city streets. Eventually he transferred these images onto paper and canvas always stirring deep public emotion. By the mid-1980s Hambleton was entering a series of paintings of implied landscape.

He has never considered himself a graffiti artist, but instead a conceptual artist who does public works. It would follow for Hambleton, as the continuous evolution of his street and studio work, to create more philosophical gestures with paint.

Over these last years, Hambleton had been more private. His new critical aesthetic series appear to be landscapes in vivid reds or dark greens; however, they are not at all about the scapes, but the experience and the emotion they evoke. “the Beautiful Paintings are not seascapes, rainscapes, or landscapes — they are Escapes,” he says.

Woodward Gallery is at 133 Eldridge Street, ground floor. For information, 212-966-3411 or www.woodwardgallery.net.