From June 27 to October 13, 2014, Madrid is to host the largest retrospective held to date on the British artist Richard Hamilton. The exhibition, organized by the Reina Sofía, was designed specifically for the Madrid museum by Hamilton himself, who became directly involved with the work when he visited the city in the early months of 2010.

The exhibition to be seen at the Museo Reina Sofía includes some 270 works created in the course of more than sixty years (1949 to 2011), and shows both the extraordinary variety of media, techniques and genres that characterizes Hamilton’s production, and the importance, influence and relevance of his revolutionary work. It is curated by Vicente Todolí and Paul Schimmel.

This is the last project in which this pioneer of Pop Art and prophet of postmodernism was directly involved before his death in September 2011. A large part of the show – about 160 works – can be visited from February 13 to May 26 at the Tate Modern in London.

The exhibition is made up of paintings, engravings, drawings, photographs, computer printouts, industrial designs and replicas. In these pieces, the artist tackled genres like the still life, the portrait, figurative representation, landscape, interiors, historical painting, political propaganda, religious iconography, and the appropriation of elements from popular culture and art history.

The exhibition is further distinguished by the important presence of five large-scale installations, which recreate exhibitions that the most influential British artist of the 20th century organized, designed or took part in.

http://www.museoreinasofia.es/en

Collection Artist(s)

Glossary

  • Landscape

    Landscape is one of the principle genres of Western art. In early paintings the landscape was a backdrop for the composition, but in the late 17th Century the appreciation of nature for its own sake began with the French and Dutch painters (from whom the term derived). Their treatment of the landscape differed: the French tried to evoke the classical landscape of ancient Greece and Rome in a highly stylised and artificial manner; the Dutch tried to paint the surrounding fields, woods and plains in a more realistic way. As a genre, landscape grew increasing popular, and by the 19th Century had moved away from a classical rendition to a more realistic view of the natural world. Two of the greatest British landscape artists of that time were John Constable and JMW Turner, whose works can be seen in the Tate collection (www.tate.org.uk). There can be no doubt that the evolution of landscape painting played a decisive role in the development of Modernism, culminating in the work of the Impressionists and Post-Impressionists . Since then its demise has often been predicted and with the rise of abstraction, landscape painting was thought to have degenerated into an amateur pursuit. However, landscape persisted in some form into high abstraction, and has been a recurrent a theme in most of the significant tendencies of the 20th Century. Now manifest in many media, landscape no longer addresses solely the depiction of topography, but encompasses issues of social, environmental and political concern.

  • Painting

    Work of art made with paint on a surface. Often the surface, also called a support, is a tightly stretched piece of canvas, paper or a wooden panel. Painting involves a wide range of techniques and materials, along with the artist's intellectual concerns effecting the content of a work.