Richard Hamilton BRITISH, 1922-2011

In his celebrated collages that set the stage for Pop art, Richard Hamilton explored the relationship between fine art, product design, and popular culture. Hamilton’s style is exemplified in his most famous work, _Just What Is It that Makes Today’s Homes So Different, So Appealing?_ (1956), which features a mélange of disparate images cut out from magazines. The result is a strange, domestic interior scene featuring a nude couple rendered in grayscale. When the Whitechapel Gallery included the piece in its seminal “This Is Tomorrow” exhibition in 1956, it was met with acclaim and helped spur the development of Pop art. Hamilton’s work has been exhibited in New York, London, Paris, Cologne, Seoul, and Los Angeles and belongs in the collections of the Kunstmuseum Basel, the Tate, the Victoria and Albert Museum, the Guggenheim Museum, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and the Museum of Modern Art. His pieces have sold for six figures on the secondary market.