Richard Hambleton: Upheaval

SEPTEMBER 12 — OCTOBER 5, 2024

“It’s presenting American mythology. Marlboro created this image of America that’s exported throughout the world. I view it as a contemporary myth.”

Richard Hambleton

Press Release

Isabel Sullivan Gallery is pleased to present Upheaval, an exhibition of paintings and photographs by street art pioneer Richard Hambleton, on view from September 12 - October 5, 2024. Highlights include his Shadowmen, Shadow Heads, and Horse & Rider series, along with 2 intimate self-portrait photographs from the 1970s.

The focal point of this exhibition is a rare painting from the mid-1980s titled Upheaval, which depicts a bucking bronco at a rodeo. Hambleton was fascinated with branding, American mythology, and the image of the Marlboro Man and its significance in the American landscape. He first explored the cowboy myth explicitly through the mediation of Marlboro Men ads, covering over their valiant forms with thick black paint as if they exuded from the tar in their lungs.

Hambleton used the fury and fervor of the rodeo pit to explore the machismo of American art itself. Upheaval, with its tilting perspectives and ruthless cropping, convene in a violent disorientation while fusing gesture with motion to revisit the basic language of Action Painting. Here, as he masterfully accents the flying forms of the tumult, he reminds us of the still recent era of Abstract Expressionism. As always, he delivers the obvious with multilayered meanings that defy and reify our presumptions, in this case playing paean and parody to the essence of our national identity.

Hambleton dedicated his career to exploring "realism" - whether that be the violence of urban cities in the 1970s as seen in his Image Mass Murder, or the lawless nature of downtown New York in the early 1980s, as represented in his lurking phantoms, the Shadowmen, or simply the beauty and awe-inspiring experience of nature, as depicted in his Seascapes and Beautiful Paintings. His paintings were known for their incredible energy and gestural nature, whether it be a 22 foot long uprising and monumental wave, or the black silhouette of a man whose internal world was erupting from its contours, or a bucking bronco kicking up an explosive storm of earth.

Richard Hambleton was born in Vancouver, Canada and studied at the Vancouver School of Art. His work is held in the permanent collections of the following institutions: the Brooklyn Museum, the MoMa, the Andy Warhol Museum and he has exhibited on two occasions at the Venice Biennale. He was the subject of a major retrospective that travelled internationally, including in Moscow at the Museum of Modern Art of the Russian Academy. Hambleton lived and worked in New York until his passing in 2017.