Richard Hamilton "The Late Works" at The National Gallery

I recently visited The National Gallery to see an exhibition of Richard Hamilton's paintings and photographs.  The exhibition was entitled "The Late Works".

Richard Hamilton was a leading British artist with a major international following.  He was among the most conceptually rigorous and technically sophisticated of modern painters.

The exhibition looked at works produced primarily in the last decade of his life.  Certain master themes recur.  They include depictions of interiors, often of enormous visual complexity, and the use of linear perspective in their construction; the female nude; allusions to Old Master painting; and Hamilton's ongoing meditation on the art of Marcel Duchamp.  His technical innovations with computer programming inform many of the works.

My favourite images from the exhibition are shown below:

"The Saensbury Wing" (1999-2000) by Richard Hamilton

The picture was painted in 2000 for the exhibition Encounters: New Art from Old.  In a variation on a painting of a church interior by the Dutch 17th-century master Pieter Saenredam, he depicted a female nude wandering alone through the Sainsbury Wing of The National Gallery.

"The Passage of the Angel to the Virgin" (2007) by Richard Hamilton

This is a modern day Annunciation evoking a Renaissance painting Hamilton had copied at The National Gallery more than 60 years before.

Among artists, Hamilton was an early and influential exponent of computers and digital printers.  The mastery that sophisticated digital programs gave Hamilton in the mathematically precise rendering of coherent space and an increasingly subtle and controlled application of colour opened up new possibilities for aesthetic experimentation.  He worked with computer technicians to enter information into a 3D-modelling program.

In recent years traditional designations of media like "oil on canvas" disappeared from his vocabulary to be replaced by such terms as "oil on Fuji/Oce LightJet on canvas".  Nonetheless, Hamilton always referred to his practice as painting.

"Hotel du Rhone" (2005) by Richard Hamilton

Hotel du Rhone shows a lobby being cleaned by a (naked) chambermaid.  Hanging on the wall behind her is one of his earlier paintings, "Lobby".  Hamilton was fascinated with how Renaissance artists of the 15th-century used the laws of one-point linear perspective to construct the illusion of three-dimensional space on two-dimensional canvases.

"Nude Descending a Staircase (No. 2) by Marcel Duchamp

The presence of Marcel Duchamp is often apparent in Hamilton's late paintings as in "Descending Nude" below, which evokes Duchamp's "Nude Descending a Staircase (No. 2) above.  Duchamp's painting portrays continuous movement through a chain of overlapping cubistic figures.

"Descending Nude" (2006) by Richard Hamilton