RICHARD HAMILTON
London,(United Kingdom) 1922 – Northend(United Kingdom) 2011

He began his training as an artist in the years before the Second World War, continuing during the war with studies of draughtsmanship and starting at the Slade School of Art in 1948. It was there that he met Eduardo Paolozzi, who introduced him to the Institute of Contemporary Arts in London, an organisation with which he collaborated regularly from 1950 onwards. That year he presented his first exhibition of his engravings, abstract representations that suggested microscopic organic forms. An innovative arrangement for the exhibition Growth and Form (1951) strengthened his career as a designer, and two years later he was contracted by King’s College at Durham University to teach design and be responsible for the Hatton Gallery. At the same time his painting began to experiment with movement, adopting a figuration influenced by Cubism and Futurism.
He became a member of the Independent Group, founded at the ICA in 1952, and in 1956, together with two other members, he designed an installation for the exhibition This is Tomorrow (Whitechapel Art Gallery), for which he made the collage Just What Is It That Makes Today’s Homes So Different, So Appealing?, in which he summed up his ideas about Pop Art and the artistic use of images derived from the mass media and from advertising, which became the iconographic basis for his paintings the following year. In 1957 he designed a revolutionary arrangement for the show An Exhibit, and he embarked on the task of reviving and publicising key avant-garde figures such as Duchamp, Schwitters and Picabia.
In the mid-sixties he focused his work on the language of photography and an analysis of its possibilities of transformation by conventional artistic painting devices, using classical themes such as portrait, landscape and still-life (My Marilyn, Toaster, Polaroid Portraits, Cosmetic Studies), with which he began to exhibit abroad. In 1970 the first retrospective of his work was presented at the Tate Gallery in London (where there was another in 1922), followed by a further retrospective at the Guggenheim Museum in New York in 1973. While not abandoning realist figuration, for which he used oils, he experimented with other techniques and supports, such as photogravure and large-format Polaroid photographs. In the eighties his texts on art were published and he began to use computer tools, extending his activity to the design of a computer commissioned by the Swedish company Isotron. He died on September 3, 2011, in Northend, United Kingdom.