Richard Hamilton

Richard Hamilton was born in London. In 1936 he worked in the publicity department of an electrical company. Later, he attended Westminster Technical College and St. Martin’s School of Art. He studied painting at the Royal Academy Schools from 1938 to 1940 and from 1941 to 1945 he worked as a draughtsman. In 1946 Hamilton was readmitted to the Royal Academy Schools, but was expelled during the same year for submitting unsatisfactory work. From 1948 to 1951 he studied painting at the Slade School of Art. His etchings from this period were shown in his first solo exhibition at Gimpel Fils in 1950.

In 1952 Hamilton began teaching silver work, typography and industrial design at the Central School of Arts and Crafts, where one of his colleagues was Eduardo Paolozzi. Hamilton and Paolozzi were founding members of the Independent Group, a group of artists and intellectuals who met to discuss cultural change in the age of technology. Hamilton began lecturing regularly at the Fine Arts Department of the King’s College in the University of Durham in 1953. By 1955 he was exhibiting his Cubist-inspired paintings at the Hanover Gallery in London. He made his first Pop collage in 1956 and from 1957 to 1961 he taught interior design at the Royal College of Art.

In 1960 Hamilton was awarded the William and Norma Copley Foundation Prize for Painting and he also published a typographical version of Marcel Duchamp’s, “Green Box”. Hamilton visited the United States for the first time in 1963. In 1970 he was awarded the Talins Prize International in Amsterdam and in 1979 he was given his first retrospective exhibition at the Tate Gallery.