Richard Hambleton
Richard Hambleton: Momentum (Selected Paintings)
Solo Exhibition
January – March 2026
Woodward Gallery Windows (132A Eldridge Street, NYC) and Artsy Viewing Room
Woodward Gallery opens the new year with Richard Hambleton: Momentum, an exhibition of works spanning 1982 – 2007. This selection brings together key bodies of work, including Beautiful Paintings, Shadowman, and Burning Merit, to trace movement as a persistent and driving force throughout Hambleton’s practice. Hambleton achieved the impossible: capturing the illusion of motion on canvas. Gesture, layering, and atmosphere generate an almost kinetic energy that invites viewers to experience the animated textures depicted in Hambleton’s paintings. Through his various styles of painting, Hambleton’s work embodies movement as energized momentum.
Richard Hambleton approached painting as an act of immediacy and intention. Working in spontaneous bursts, he translated emotional and physical states directly onto the surface. His practice was deeply participatory, shaped by a belief that art functions as both a psychological and sociological encounter. Materials were mixed intuitively, varnishes, pigments, and unconventional substances layered in ways that reveal the artist’s inner state. Nothing in Hambleton’s work is static; everything is in motion.
The Beautiful Paintings, including Priscilla (2006) and Magdalena (2007), evoke the qualities of dawn and dusk. Incorporating silver leaf, these dramatic seascape works function as immersive experiences. Once presented in David Rockefeller’s art gallery at Rockefeller State Park Preserve, these works underscore Hambleton’s capacity to channel stillness, depth, and quiet momentum, an encounter that lingers well beyond the first viewing.
In Malibu (1986), a stark black monolith, an ancient symbol of life and transcendence, is intended to be an entry point to heaven. Acting simultaneously as barrier and passage, this foreboding rectangle shields the viewer from the sun’s intensity while also offering entry into it. In this and related works, Hambleton’s use of vertical black lines functions as collapsed shadows, a modern element he sometimes added, both an echo of Hambleton’s iconic figures and a conceptual homage to Abstract Expressionist Barnett Newman.
Another significant body of work in the exhibition centers on horse-and-rider imagery. Drawing from cigarette advertising, most notably the Marlboro Man, Hambleton critiqued American hypermasculinity and the commodification of identity. Instead of a cool-looking cowboy, Hambleton painted the Marlboro Man as a shadowy silhouette, symbolizing the dangers of smoking. Reappropriating the ads, Richard sometimes embedded actual tobacco into the paint, confronting seduction and toxicity simultaneously.
The Burning Merit series critiques vintage Merit cigarette advertisements, replacing the fantasized image of a ship full of happy smokers, with a dark parody of this same ship on fire from a stray lit cigarette. Through the explosive imagery of a burning ship, momentum is harnessed. Romanticization of cigarette addiction and the catastrophic effects of smoking culture collide.
Freiburg (1982), a striking Shadowman painting, depicts an exploding white figure suspended in motion. Like the broader Shadowman series, originally conceived as urban interventions, this work captures sudden presence, psychological tension, and the shock of encounter. The figure feels alive, erupting into the viewer’s space with urgency and force.
Together, the Beautiful Paintings, Shadowman, and Burning Merit works reveal Hambleton’s engagement with nature and the human psyche. Momentum emerges not only as physical movement, but as something accumulated, lived, and carried forward, an enduring force that defines Hambleton’s legacy. Richard Hambleton’s art carries the viewer beyond the canvas, where their momentum continues to unfold long after the encounter ends.
Richard Hambleton: Momentum is on view at Woodward Gallery’s 132A Eldridge Street location from late January throughout March 2026, also available on our website, and as a Viewing Room on Artsy.net. We welcome you to join us in person or online this winter.
