One of Britain’s pop-art founding fathers, Richard Hamilton, got a whole chunk of love from the Tate Modern recently with a new exhibition featuring a full retrospective on his life and career. Spanning 61 years in the eye of the artistic revolution that crossed into the the latter half of the 20th Century the exhibition leads right the way up to Hamilton’s final works this side of the 20s before his death in 2011.
The exhibition opened on Thursday the 13th February 2014, the Tate Modern exhibition is set to run through until Monday the 26th May 2014, giving you the entirety of spring 2014 to catch the showcase. Ticket prices are £14.50 for adults (including a £1.40 donation) and £12.50 for concessiona (including a £1.20 donation). Opening times are 10am–6pm between Sunday and Thursday, with last admission and ticket sales to the exhibitions at 5.15pm, and 10am to 10pm on Friday and Saturday, with last admission and ticket sales to the exhibitions is at 9.15pm.
The States had Warhol and we had Hamilton and in 2014 the Tate Modern will be featuring both sides of the Atlantic pop-art blow-up in a year that appears to celebrate the ever fracturing break away from traditional forms of art. While we’ll have to wait for autumn for the Andy Warhol exhibition, we get to see the best of Richard Hamilton’s production in just a few weeks.
Including everything from his earliest 1950s exhibition designs, through to his explosive part in the birth of pop art, including his unprecedented Fun House installation from 1956, the retrospective will take us right the way back to Hamilton’s burgeoning influence on modern art. Images of Mick Jagger, Bing Crosby and Marilyn Monroe taken in the swing of London in the late 60s will also be on display for the exhibition, along with his famous, Hannah Höch inspired magazine cut-out collage work to reiterate his focus on popular culture of the time.
Throughout his career in art, his work has touched everything from gun crime to acts of terrorism and controversial political figures, and all of this will come under the scrutiny of the retrospective as a part of the evolving story of his role in modern art. However, even here it is the characters at the centre of popular culture at the time that Richard Hamilton fixated on, identifying the compelling pull it has on all our lives.
In and amongst all of the pop-art, the artist’s love of design and architecture are never too far away and this element of his career will also be covered in the exhibition.
The Richard Hamilton exhibition is curated by Mark Godfrey, Curator of International Art at the Tate Modern, along with Hannah Dewar, as the Assistant Curator. It was created by the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía, Madrid in collaboration with the guys at the Tate.
