Richard Hambleton | Double Shadow Head, Gold | Original

Richard Hambleton (1952–2017)
Double Shadow Head, Gold
Acrylic on canvas | Original

In the early 1980s, when New York was still dangerous, Richard Hambleton painted ominous black silhouettes on unexpected street corners and in alleyways across Manhattan. They startled passers-by — figures lurking at the edges of vision, present before you understood what you were seeing. These Shadowman works preceded Banksy, preceded KAWS, preceded the entire genre we now call street art. Hambleton was doing it first, alongside his contemporaries Jean-Michel Basquiat and Keith Haring. In those years, he was more famous than either of them.

Double Shadow Head, Gold is among the most commanding works Hambleton produced in his later career. Two gestural Shadow Head silhouettes — a sophisticated evolution of the Shadowman motif — are rendered in his characteristic splatter technique against a luminous gold ground. The contrast is precise and deliberate: the rawness of the mark-making against the luxury of the surface. The gold does not soften the figures. It makes them more insistent.

Giorgio Armani collected Hambleton. So did Andy Warhol. His work is held in the Brooklyn Museum, the Andy Warhol Museum, the New Museum, and the Museum of Modern Art. The documentary Shadowman, which premiered at the Tribeca Film Festival shortly before his death in 2017, introduced his work to a new generation of collectors and drove significant secondary market activity. Works of this scale and quality are now exceptional in their rarity.

Available through Creed Gallery, Ascot. Private viewings by appointment. Secure, insured delivery throughout Berkshire, Surrey, and London.

Original
Acrylic on canvas
Artwork: 78 × 60 in (198 × 152 cm)
Framed: 82 × 64 in (208 × 163 cm)
Contemporary frame to conservation standards
Certificate of Authenticity