David Zwirner is showing a selection of rarely seen works by the late British artist Richard Hamilton in THE UPPER ROOM at the gallery’s London location.Regarded as one of the most influential artists of the 20th century, Hamilton is perhaps best known for his contributions to the development of Pop art in Britain. “Cadaqués” at David Zwirner unites a group of paintings made by the artist in Cadaqués, Spain where he was first invited in 1963 by Marcel Duchamp with whom he had corresponded since the late 1950s.Located on the Costa Brava in Northeastern Spain, Cadaqués was known as a favoured destination for artists like Duchamp, Salvador Dalí, Joan Miró, and Pablo Picasso.The town was an important site of artist production for Hamilton, who exhibited at Lanfranco Bombelli Galería Cadaqués more than a dozen times.One of the highlights of the exhibition is a series of works that appropriate the iconic logo of Ricard liqueur, to which the artist wittily added an “h” to change the logo to his own name.Hamilton’s logo was applied to replicas of the same signs and vessels on which the original logo could typically be found, such as the carafe and ashtray in the exhibition.Hamilton often drew on commercial advertising in his work, with logos proving to be a particularly fertile source of inspiration for the artist.According to the Gallery, when the Ricard works were first exhibited in 1975, Paul Ricard himself arranged for actual Ricard signs to be interspersed with Hamilton’s variations.The exhibition also includes several works with a more direct connection to Cadaqués, the most important of which is “Sunrise – progressives” (1974)Never before exhibited outside of Spain, the work belongs to a group of prints and drawings that derive from a postcard of Cadaqués featuring the city’s cathedral.As with all the “Sunrise works,” the nine-part “Sunrise – progressives” (1974) features as its focus a giant turd, in this case replacing the image of the cathedral.The cathedral once again appears in the artist’s “Altar piece” (1980) collage, while the artist’s “Flower-piece study (a)” (1971) still-life features imagery copied from a three-dimensional postcard.Richard Hamilton: Cadaqués is at David Zwirner London until May 28, 2016
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