Richard Hambleton

View works. Yield Gallery Richard Hambleton
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“I painted the town black."

– RICHARD HAMBLETON

 

Richard Hambleton was Considered by many to be the Godfather of street art (a title the artist rejected) Hambleton first appeared on the scene in 1976 with his Mass Murder series. 
He created 600 across 15 cities, the American-Canadian would anonymously chalk the outline of bodies, creating a vivid impression of murder scenes. But it was the dark, life-sized, black-silhouetted figure of his early eighties character, the Shadowman, that propelled him to fame - he painted 450 of them on the walls of New York City.

As Hambleton became more established the artist started to paint on canvas in which Galleries quickly embraced him . As did Europe, when he toured the continent in the early eighties, painting his Shadowmen on the walls of London, Paris, Berlin and Rome.  

But money and fame didn't satisfy Hambleton, and by the nineties, with an aggressive and ever-worsening drug habit, he had fallen out of view.

The exhibition then travelled to Milan, Moscow, Cannes and Paris, before returning to New York in 2011. By now Hambleton's name was once more being held in the same high esteem it had garnered in the 1980s, when he was more famous than his contemporaries Jean-Michel Basquiat and Keith Haring, and had twice appeared on the cover of Life magazine.