Toaster Richard Hamilton

Richard Hamilton was born in Pimlico, London on February 24, 1922. He did an apprenticeship for an electrical components firm, during which time he began to take evening classes at Saint Martin’s School of Art and the Westminster School of Art.

In 1938, Hamilton enrolled in the Royal Academy of Arts. His studies here were unfortunately cut short the following year as he joined the army as a technical draughtsman for the duration of World War II. Following the war, Hamilton spent two years at the Slade School of Art, University College, London. 

Hamilton began to exhibit his art at the Institute of Contemporary Art (ICA), and taught at the Central School of Art and Design from 1952. The first major exhibition of Hamilton’s paintings was shown at the Hanover Gallery, London in 1955. In 1993, Hamilton represented Great Britain at the Venice Biennale and was awarded the Golden Lion. He has been the subject of several major exhibitions at Tate in London, notably in 1970 and 1992. Other retrospectives include at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York in 1973, MACBA in Barcelona, Museum Ludwig in Cologne and the Neue Nationalgalerie in Berlin. 

In 2010, the Serpentine Gallery presented Hamilton’s work “Modern Moral Matters,” an exhibition which largely focused on Hamilton’s political and protest works. Hamilton has been showcased in the Minneapolis Institute of Art’s “Richard Hamilton: Pop Art Pioneer 1922-2011,” and the National Gallery’s “Richard Hamilton: The Late Works” opened in 2012. 

Hamilton has been awarded with the John Moores Painting Prize (1969), the Talens Prize International (1970), the Leone d’Oro (1993), the Arnold Bode Prize (1997) and has been made a Member of the Order of the Companions of Honour (CH) in 2010. The Tate gallery in London has the largest repository of Hamilton’s work, but he is collected worldwide including at the Alan Cristea Gallery and the Museo Ncional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía.

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(Biography provided by Shapero Modern)

Decorating with fine art prints — whether they’re figurative prints, abstract prints or another variety — has always been a practical way of bringing a space to life as well as bringing works by an artist you love into your home.

Pursued in the 1960s and ’70s, largely by Pop artists drawn to its associations with mass production, advertising, packaging and seriality, as well as those challenging the primacy of the Abstract Expressionist brushstroke, printmaking was embraced in the 1980s by painters and conceptual artists ranging from David Salle and Elizabeth Murray to Adrian Piper and Sherrie Levine.

Printmaking is the transfer of an image from one surface to another. An artist takes a material like stone, metal, wood or wax, carves, incises, draws or otherwise marks it with an image, inks or paints it and then transfers the image to a piece of paper or other material.

Fine art prints are frequently confused with their more commercial counterparts. After all, our closest connection to the printed image is through mass-produced newspapers, magazines and books, and many people don’t realize that even though prints are editions, they start with an original image created by an artist with the intent of reproducing it in a small batch. Fine art prints are created in strictly limited editions — 20 or 30 or maybe 50 — and are always based on an image created specifically to be made into an edition.

Many people think of revered Dutch artist Rembrandt as a painter but may not know that he was a printmaker as well. His prints have been preserved in time along with the work of other celebrated printmakers such as Pablo Picasso, Salvador Dalí and Andy Warhol. These fine art prints are still highly sought after by collectors.

“It’s another tool in the artist’s toolbox, just like painting or sculpture or anything else that an artist uses in the service of mark making or expressing him- or herself,” says International Fine Print Dealers Association (IFPDA) vice president Betsy Senior, of New York’s Betsy Senior Fine Art, Inc.

Because artist’s editions tend to be more affordable and available than his or her unique works, they’re more accessible and can be a great opportunity to bring a variety of colors, textures and shapes into a space.

For tight corners, select small fine art prints as opposed to the oversized bold piece you’ll hang as a focal point in the dining area. But be careful not to choose something that is too big for your space. And feel free to lean into it if need be — not every work needs picture-hanging hooks. Leaning a larger fine art print against the wall behind a bookcase can add a stylish installation-type dynamic to your living room. (Read more about how to arrange wall art here.)

Find fine art prints for sale on 1stDibs today.