Richard William Hamilton

Richard William Hamilton was a British painter and collage artist Hamilton was born in Pimlico, London. Despite having left school with no formal qualifications, he managed to gain employment as an apprentice working at an electrical components firm, where he discovered an ability for draughtsmanship and began to do painting at evening classes at St Martin's School of Art. This led to his entry into the Royal Academy Schools. Hamilton gave a 1959 lecture titled “Glorious Technicolor, Breathtaking Cinemascope and Stereophonic Sound", a phrase taken from a Cole Porter lyric in the 1957 musical Silk Stockings. In that lecture, which sported a pop soundtrack and the demonstration of an early Polaroid camera, Hamilton deconstructed the technology of cinema to explain how it helped to create Hollywood’s allure. He further developed that theme in the early 1960s with a series of paintings inspired by film stills and publicity shots. The first exhibition of Hamilton's paintings was shown at the Hanover Gallery, London, in 1955. In 1993 Hamilton represented Great Britain at the Venice Biennale and was awarded the Golden Lion.