From his “Mass Murder” installations of the late 1970s, in which he secretly placed blood-splattered, chalk-body outlines throughout 15 cities, to his “Shadowman” series of the 1980s, where ominous, shadowy figures were painted in unexpected corners, alleys, and side streets, Richard Hambleton has permeated our collective consciousness with unforgettable images for over three decades. One of the only surviving members of a peer group that included Warhol, Basquiat, and Haring, Hambleton has been living a reclusive life in his Lower East Side studio for the past twenty years.
Despite a low public profile, Hambleton has continued to create and his works can be found in the permanent collections of the Museum of Modern Art, the Brooklyn Museum, The Houston Museum of Fine Art, The Check Point Charlie Museum and The Zellermeyer in Berlin, the Andy Warhol Museum, the Austin Museum of Art, the Milwaukee Art Museum, the New Museum of Contemporary Art, the Queens Museum, and Harvard University. He was chosen for the Venice Biennale in 1984.
And in case you’re interested on some of the fantastic people who turned up, there’s this below. But then again you were probably there as marvelous and as fantastic all the rest of us, well at least in spirit. Congratulations Richard Hambleton.
