Richard Hamilton

Richard Hamilton’s solo exhibition in Venice, which takes place at the Bevilacqua La Masa Foundation and coincides with the 52nd Venice Biennale of Art, involves the entire space of the Foundation’s Palazzotto Tito (Dorsoduro 2826, Venice). In addition to thirteen large and medium-sized canvases, the exhibition will also consist of furniture, objects, and furnishings designed by the artist.

Opening the exhibition are portraits of the artists’ friends, Dieter Roth and Derek Barman, along with a graphic piece dealing with domestic space, Chiara & chair, in which the construction of the image, the horizontal lines, and the vanishing points are exposed by the artist himself and reveal the duo essence of his latest work: on the one hand, a meticulous and almost maniacal structuring of space created by overlapping photographic elements and then transposing them onto canvas by the aid of computer techniques; on the other, the pictorial intervention where the artist works on the material, blurring the image or recreating by hand that which the photographs, even the most detailed of ones, fail to capture.

Since the 1990s Hamilton has moved from portraying characters of popular iconography to more intimist works. The Angels, as he calls them, are people who he knows, long-time friends, private situations, or the interiors of his own home.

The exhibition continues with a famous work, of which another version exists in the Staatlich Museen collection in Kassel: the passage of the bride II, a piece that the artist has been working on for almost 10 years by slowly adding or modifying small details. At times he gives us a view of the space: a hallway, a window opening onto a green space, the originary white light and its reflections in a mirror on the wall. Other times the presence of a volatile woman, the bride, is glimpsed in the reflections. Next to the painting, near the window, several objects present in the work are transposed in space. Again the female figure reappears in the Bathroom – fig.1 and in the Bathroom – fig. 2. Here the magenta red of the surface is made vibrant by the brush-strokes of the artist, and a woman, swathed in symbolic white cloth, crosses the space.

In the final rooms we have a chance to view the artist’s latest and not yet seen works: an annunciation (a) and (b), Athena.

The appearance of the women, almost alien to their surroundings, the white light that pervades the work and the exhibition space, the images reconstructed from different perspectives or from similar perspectives but repositioned in different settings, all encourage reflection on the constant cross-reference between everyday life and the work of art, between man and his relation to space and to objects. Hamilton’s “What is it that makes today’s homes so different, so appealing?”, suggests that at the heart of this question is man, together with his connections, bonds, and relationships. A man of interdisciplinary culture, Hamilton is a fundamental figure in the history of contemporary art. His collaborative work with Marcel Duchamp is well-known, as are his studies on the Green Box (1968) from which he reconstructed the numerous versions of Le Grand Verre.

The exhibition, as the artist’s first personal one in Italy, will be accompanied by a catalogue documenting the works present at the Bevilacqua La Masa Foundation.

Richard Hamilton
A host of Angel