Richard Hamilton - Serpentine Gallery, London
The Serpentine Gallery is a delectable bite-sized chunk of art in South Kensington. If you haven’t been there before, it may be small but, it continues to punch well above its weight. Home of (you’ve all heard it before here) the guru that never sleeps; but eat, shits, breathes art - Hans Ulrich Obrist, and his co-conspirator ‘in the art’ of art Julia Peyton-Jones.
Currently on show is Richard Hamilton. An artist that addresses the political and reflects in his multi-medium work (screen-print, paint, etching, water-colour) the palimpsest of interpretation of events by the mass media. Effectively for me, he abstracts an experience and, in some cases, creates multiple works offering a critique (perhaps?) of how messages are delivered to the people. A good of example of this is Swingeing London 67 (Mick Jagger & Robert Fraser after being arrested for possession of drugs) which features ten times in the gallery in different media.
Highlights; The Citizen Hamilton’s portrait of the IRA hunger-striker Bobby Sands in the Maze prison, never ceases to appall me. A man driven to this extreme, surely should make us question - why?. And who could forget Shock & Awe - Tony Blair as the rhinestone cowboy, to quote the song (my goodness it’s so apt!):
I know every crack in these dirty sidewalks of Broadway
Where hustle’s the name of the game
And nice guys get washed away like the snow and the rain
There’s been a load of compromisin’
On the road to my horizon
But I’m gonna be where the lights are shinin’ on me
