Richard Hambleton

Richard Hambleton was an American-Canadian graffiti artist who is widely credited as the original godfather of street art and one of the catalysts of the revolution that exploded in New York's East Side in the 1980s. He is perhaps best known for his recurring motif of a black-silhouetted figure known as the 'Shadowman'. Along with his contemporaries Keith Haring and Jean-Michel Basquiat, Hambleton painted directly on the streets of New York and achieved success during the art boom of the 1980s.

Despite stellar success, Hambleton's reputation faded into relative obscurity in the 1990s, partly due to his battling with a widely reported Heroin addiction. His fortunes were revived in 2010 with Vladimir Restoin Roitfeld and Andy Valmorbida's major retrospective of his work (supported by Giorgio Armani). The sell-out show opened in New York during Fashion Week, and further toured in Milan, Cannes, Moscow and London.

Today his works are held in the collections of the Brooklyn Museum, the Andy Warhol Museum in Pittsburgh and the Museum of Modern Art in New York, among others.

Courtesy of AB Projects