Expressionist Richard Hambleton’s Work At Chase

Over July 4 weekend, Chase Contemporary will open “Shadowmen” the first solo exhibition in its new East Hampton location with a selection of medium and large-scale canvas works by acclaimed expressionist urban painter Richard Hambleton.

This installation at Chase Contemporary will run July 1 to July 18 and marks the first time a Hambleton exhibition of this size has been presented on the East End. An opening reception for the work will be held on Thursday, July 1, from 4 to 7 p.m.

Hailed as the “godfather of street art,” the Canadian-born Hambleton is recognized around the world for his daring, dark graffiti style which he displayed on walls of burnt out buildings, along the passages and streets of off-beat neighborhoods and other non-traditional settings. While his work is often compared with graffiti artists Keith Haring and Jean-Michel Basquiat, it was his larger-than-life black “shadowmen” which began to appear around New York streets and first captured the attention of New York critics in the 1980s. The shadowmen and his earlier, more controversial “mass murder” installations set him apart from his contemporaries.

Hambleton’s first solo exhibition opened in New York on the Lower East Side in 1982, and just two years later, his work was included in the Venice Biennale. Hambleton was included in the Venice Biennale again in 1988. From 2009 to 2011, a major retrospective of his work was mounted in collaboration with Giorgio Armani, touring multiple venues including the Moscow Museum of Modern Art and Phillips de Pury in New York. “Shadowman,” a film about Hambleton by director Oren Jacoby, premiered at the Tribeca Film Festival in 2017. Today, his works are held in the collections of the Brooklyn Museum, The Andy Warhol Museum in Pittsburgh, the Moco Museum in Amsterdam, and The Museum of Modern Art in New York, among others. Hambleton continued to live and work in New York until his death in 2017.

Chase Contemporary is located at 66 Newtown Lane, East Hampton. For more information, visit chasecontemporary.com.