Anthea Hamilton - Power for Sale

Anthea Hamilton - Rice Cake

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Anthea Hamilton - Manarch (Pasta)

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Anthea Hamilton

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Power, 2015

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About The Work

Anthea Hamilton investigates cultural appropriation and pop culture, mining countercultures in music, fashion, and design (such as disco in the 1970s) and their entrance into the mainstream. Displacement and association recur in many of Hamilton's works, which often occur through the merging of an image and an object. Originally created as Hamilton's contribution to SculptureCenter's 2014 publication What About Power? Inquiries into Contemporary Sculpture, Power examines the intersection of power and sculpture. The boot depicted exists within a code of fashion: the wearer makes a statement that may have been original once, but now has become part of a highly encoded system and historical narrative. Merging the fashion system of the boot with the language of graphic design and implicating the body into this convergence, the leg attached to the boot twists becomes the stem of the "p." In these prints design extends out of and even obscures the body.

About Anthea Hamilton

Anthea Hamilton is a UK-based artist who creates multi-media installations that resemble theatrical stages or film sets and incorporate arrangements of prop-like objects, references to modernist paintings, and appropriated images of pop culture icons such as blow-ups of John Travolta in John Travolta, Bust-like, 2012. Often playing with images and materials associated with beauty and desire, Hamilton repeatedly uses sculptural cut-outs of film stills or women’s legs made from transparent plastic and wooden shapes based on Modernist depictions of female nudes such as the curvy abstracted figure found in her 2007 piece The Piano Lesson, based on Fernand Léger’s 1921 painting Le Grand Déjeuner. Through a range of image sources and her stage-like environments, such as gallery walls painted with Chroma Key blue paint used in film or TV studios, Hamilton explores our associations to surreal and seductive cultural imagery while examining the histories of art, film, and performance.

Hamilton had her first solo show at Chisenhale Gallery in London and has exhibited internationally at the Tate Britain, London; the Kunstverein Freiburg, Germany; La Salle de bans, Lyon; and the Palais de Tokyo, Paris. Her first solo show in the U.S. was at Sculpture Center in New York in 2015. Recently she designed the poster for the London 2012 Olympic Games and presented a performance at the Tate Modern in London for The Tanks: Art in Action series, 2012.