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POSSESSED OF A CALM-INDUCING RESONANCE that is as hard to place “There are also artists whom I have been attracted to, and taken
intellectually as it is to define emotionally, Richard Hamilton’s new great interest in, but for the very reason that their work was in fact so
group of paintings – titled A Host of Angels, and exhibited for the first removed from what I do,” he observes, in one of those deft reversals
time in Venice this summer – conveys a profound sense of presence of the expected that have become a hallmark of his art. “Frank Stella’s
that owes as much to meditational recollection as it does to thanks- insistence on what he called his ‘non-allusive’ art was one example –
filled celebration. Stillness and serenity prevail as nude female figures when I want my own art to be completely allusive! And I felt the same
– austere, impassive, verging on translucent – find their place within about Francis Bacon. I thought, he always starts from backgrounds
interiors that are, if one can say such a thing, timelessly modern. In an that are coloured; while I always work from white. And so I began to
ultraviolet blur of elegant wings, a young woman steps easily down from think that mine was a white art, and his a black art. It’s just coming from
air to solid ground – a heavenly messenger whose demeanour conveys different ways of working.”
an elemental purity made all the more convincing for appearing so In an earlier conversation, when I spoke with Hamilton prior to
quotidian and contemporary. the opening of his Painting by Numbers exhibition at the Alan Cristea
The 12 ‘angels’ are joined by two earlier paintings by Hamilton: Gallery in London last year, he also referred to his career-long intent to
the portraits Dieter Roth (1993) and Derek Jarman (1994), which he make art that was ‘multi-allusive’: “I wanted it to be about everything
describes as the ‘protective saints’ of the rest of the group. Together, that was going on in the world,” he said, adding, “that’s what art is really
the 14 works are exhibited in a special installation created by the artist, about – the understanding of living.”
which is augmented by some of the objects that appear in the paintings With this in mind, one might now regard A Host of Angels as
– a Gaudí bench, for example, and an Eames chair. maintaining Hamilton’s desire to make art that refers both to the vibrant
Seeing these latest paintings in Hamilton’s studio at his home in experience of a long life and to his tireless exploration of the technical
the Oxfordshire countryside, and listening to his deeply felt, endlessly problems of artmaking. Put another way, one can relate Hamilton’s
good-humoured account of their technical and conceptual creation, intense work on this group of paintings to the central concern within his
one cannot help but be aware of his phenomenal importance as a art that has found its principal inspiration in the work of Duchamp and,
living artist. Now in his mid-eighties, he remains as advanced in the more specifically, in the great recreation that Hamilton made between
pioneering of a dialogue between the capacities of modern technology 1965 and 1966 of Duchamp’s The Bride Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors,
and the demands of fine art as he was in the middle years of the 1950s. Even (The Large Glass) (1915–23).
In another sense, his seniority can be gauged from the fact that his Reduced to its simplest terms, the baton passed by Duchamp on
friends and immediate artistic colleagues were Marcel Duchamp, to Hamilton might be said to comprise a bravura balancing of opposites:
Joseph Beuys and Andy Warhol. of technical problem-solving and intense intellectual conceptualism,
Hamilton prefefers to route discussion of his
own art through his lifetime’s concentration
on that of Duchamp
right: Portrait of a Woman As an Artist (with Rita Donagh), 2007,
oil on Fuji lightjet on canvas, 100 x 123 cm
facing page: The Passage of the Angel to the Virgin, 2006,
digital montage, Epson inkjet on paper, 130 x 180 cm
p072-079 Richard Hamilton AR Jul75 75 23/5/07 02:45:40
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