Richard Hamilton, Tate Modern, 17 April 14
http://www.tate.org.uk/whats-on/tate-modern/exhibition/richard-hamilton
The entrance to this exhibition cakes as quite a surprise! There were numerous images of biological microscopy employing some of my favourite techniques from electron micographs to live cell imaging. Hamilton’s early work was much influenced by D’Arcy Wentworth Thompson’s 1917 text On Growth and Form. The Tate have reconstructed Hamilton Growth and Form, from 1951 which he made it as part of an exhibition design for the Festival of Britain.
This opening got my attention & I looking at the (manipulation) of imagery in the rest of the exhibition I suddenly I ‘got’ Hamilton – something that had previously eluded my. Interesting to muse on of the range of image manipulation on display from the pre-photoshop era.
I found In Treatment Room from 1984 truly traumatic. Despite have a chronic health condition I absolutely hate hospitals. Just above the bed in a grim hospital procedure room a television plays a 1983 Conservative election broadcast showing Margaret Thatcher. Apparently in this instillation “Hamiliton confronts the decline of post-war utopianism and the rise of monetarist Britain” (1). I felt I was witnessing a scene of therapy in which overexposure to this broadcast was the only possible cure for some dreadful disease which the absent patient could no longer tolerate the treatment. I couldn’t either & left rapidly.
1. http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/art/art-reviews/10629552/Richard-Hamilton-Tate-Modern-review-Britains-greatest-20th-century-artist.html
http://www.ica.org.uk/whats-on/richard-hamilton-ica
