May 5 – 29, 2022
Press Release Installation Views Selected Works News Richard Hambleton | Beyond the Shadowman May 5 – 29, 2022 (New York, NY) Chase Contemporary is pleased to announce a retrospective exhibition for Canadian artist Richard Hambleton featuring works created between 1976 and 2017. Richard Hambleton: Beyond the Shadowman will showcase Hambleton's contribution to the history of contemporary public and conceptual art. Through a presentation of the artist's shadow paintings, seascapes, and a series of never-before-seen photographs taken by the artist between 1976 and 1979, the exhibition will provide a unique insight into the artist's creative, conceptual life. Opening in the gallery's 10,000 square foot SoHo flagship, the exhibition will show the artist's work in its origins, as many of the public shadow figures of the early 1980s were painted in Manhattan's Lower East Side and SoHo. An opening reception will be held on Thursday, May 5, from 6-8 p.m. The exhibition will be accompanied by a catalog with essays by art critic and historian Carlo McCormick and collector Ken Moss. The press walkthrough will be held on Thursday, May 5, from 2-5 p.m. Richard Hambleton executed his public art project Image Mass Murder between April 1976 and October 1979 throughout Los Angeles, San Francisco, Portland, Seattle, Victoria, Vancouver, Banff, Regina, Winnipeg, Toronto, Ottawa, Montreal, Chicago, and New York, totalling 620 murder scenes. Operating under the pseudonym Mr. Ree during this period, he alluded to the series as a cultural analysis of the murder-mystery genre in popular culture. In Hambleton's words, it was a "masterpiece of 20th century realism." Hambleton began painting his shadow figures- the Nightlife series- across the Lower East Side in the early 1980s, for which he received extraordinary recognition. The mystery of the man working at night and the feral black figures popping up around the city echoed the mystique of Hambleton's Mr.Ree character and his murder scenes. During this period, Hambleton exhibited at many international galleries, including Club 57, New York; Alexander Milliken Gallery, New York; Vancouver Art Gallery, Vancouver; Greenville County Museum