RICHARD HAMBLETON

(1952-2017)

Standing Shadowman
2012

Footnotes

Provenance
Private Collection, New York (acquired directly from the artist)
Shin Gallery, New York (acquired directly from the above)



Richard Hambleton: Melding the City into the Shape of a Canvas
by Ekin Erkan, Shin Gallery

The Canadian-born artist Richard Hambleton (June 23, 1952 – October 29, 2017), colloquially known as the "Godfather of Street Art" amongst insiders, was a fixture in Manhattan during the early 1980s. Hambleton's retinue included Keith Haring and Jean-Michel Basquiat, all tragic figures in their own right, initially scrounging in poverty whilst following their passion amongst scrawled walls and cragged sidewalk that they bent in the shape of a canvas. Today, we all know the names Banksy, Kaws, and Shepard Fairey; if one is better informed, they may even know the stencil-based street artist, Blek Le Rat. But without Hambleton, none of these artists–all of whom pay homage to and exalt Hambleton in interviews and art practice–would have developed their own unique street art lexicon.

Hambleton gained a cult following with his splattered, adumbrated images of outlined figures on buildings throughout the Lower East Side. Hambleton was truly one of the bohemian spirits threading through the downtown scene–frail, even ghastly, stumbling but never dropping the buckets of black paint he balanced in his fingers, alongside a handy paintbrush. The brush-and-bucket, not the aerosol can, were his tools par excellence. Hambleton's early public art from 1976 to 1978 included the Image Mass Murder, a predecessor to the Shadowman works. In the former, Hambleton would paint a police "chalk" outline around bodies of volunteer "homicide victims". He would then drip flecks of bright crimson paint on the outline, the result being a realistic-looking crime scene. Some read these as critiques of police, others as a documentary process of the city's malefactions. Hambleton subsequently trekked through 15 major cities across the United States and Canada where he produced these outlines, showing an undoubtedly prolific discipline. Then came the Shadowman pieces, clandestinely executed with expressive flourishes of speedy brushwork. Highly stylized, life-size figures and animals, these were charted on derelict structures–again, first in downtown Manhattan and then internationally. Hambleton's Shadowman even adorned the Berlin Wall.

Hambleton was a fixture on the East Village gallery scene, but following the mid-'80s, he disappeared for a time. Hambleton retreated to his studio on the corner of Grand St. and Orchard St. to develop a distinctive form of gestural abstraction inspired by nature and the nineteenth century American Luminists, teeming with mellificious pools of color. This marked something of a turn away from the urban environment and Street Art proper, as evinced by his late-career "The Beautiful Paintings" 2007 solo exhibition. Unfortunately, during this period he was diagnosed with skin cancer and took to self-medicating.

In 2012, Hong Gyu Shin opened Shin Gallery, across the street from Richard Hambleton's studio. During the early days of the gallery, which now spans three gallery rooms, Hambleton would visit the gallery regularly. He would usually arrive around 6:10 PM, 20 minutes prior to the gallery's closing. Shin had a makeshift bedroom downstairs, and the two would discuss art history and the downtown scene at length. Hambleton, ever-opinionated, introduced Shin to many of the bastions of Contemporary Art, unspooling tales of his time at Club 57 and how Hambleton and his good friend Basquiat would trade artworks with one another. Each evening, Hambleton would mount his meager children's bicycle and peddle over to the gallery, propping it against the gallery's glass door before spending hours into the evening exchanging such tales with Shin.

One day, Hambleton, increasingly destitute and afflicted by addiction, was evicted from his studio. He had been unable to pay his rent. The artist was still sharp but had become something of a loner. Left with nowhere to work and no friends who would help him, Shin stepped in and offered to let Hambleton use the gallery as a makeshift studio after hours. Every evening, the gallery staff would dismount the artworks exhibited to clear a space for Hambleton to work and, each morning, reinstall the works. By the time Shin would go to bed downstairs, Hambleton would have just propped up a blank, pallid canvas. When he woke, the canvases showed dazzling images–Shin recalls, in particular, one particularly captivating painting of an energetic rodeo with a horse buoyantly jumping.

Consigned by Hong Gyu Shin, Standing Shadowman is executed in acrylic on a steel door. It is an example of Hambleton's idiosyncratic Shadowman paintings. The tradition of using the door as a canvas is tried and true–e.g., Basquiat's 1985 painting Sam F, featuring a suit-jacketed man in a wheelchair, painted on an apartment door. This piece not only shows a Street artist at his peak maturity but also speaks to Hambleton's choice material–the urban surroundings which he cultivated into canvases.