Richard Hambleton

Richard Hambleton was born in Vancouver in 1954. He graduated from the Vancouver School of Art (now Emily Carr University of Art and Design) in 1975, and subsequently attended the San Francisco Institute of Art. Hambleton is best known for his Mass Murder and Shadowman paintings, public artworks completed in the 1970s and 1980s in major cities across the United States and Canada. A contemporary of Keith Haring and Jean-Michel Basquiat, Hambleton became known as the "Godfather of Street Art." After Hambleton retreated from the art world in 1985 while living in New York, his work had a resurgence in popularity due to the 2009 retrospective Richard Hambleton - New York, which sold out during its exhibition in New York during Fashion Week. The show later traveled to Milan and Moscow. Figure is an impressive large-scale work by Hambleton from 1983. A studio version of the Shadowman series, in which the artist painted menacing, life-size silhouettes of figures on buildings, lurking in alleyways and in shadowy corners, Figure leaps off the canvas. Splashes of stark white pigment pop against the dark background, recalling their original site-specific nature. The figure seems to be either falling, springing, or perhaps, as in the Mass Murder works, splayed on the ground. Dynamic and dramatic, Figure is an outstanding example from Hambleton's oeuvre.