理查德·哈密尔顿认领

This work is a remake of an image Hamilton originally created in 1956 as part of his contribution to the influential group exhibition This is Tomorrow at Whitechapel Art Gallery. The original work is was one of Hamilton’s most famous images and has become an icon of British Pop art. As part of a 1992 BBC television programme he demonstrated how an artist can use a computer to generate art by recreating the 1956 collage in a way that reflected the 1990s, such as the circuit board wallpaper and caricature of Margaret Thatcher.

The citizen was based on stills from a 1980 news report about the IRA ‘dirty protest’. After the government revoked their Special Category status and began to treat them as ordinary criminals, inmates in Long Kesh decided to wear only prison blankets and to daub their cell walls with excrement. Hamilton wrote that he could not ‘condone the methods’ of the IRA, but was struck by the resemblance to Christian martyrdom. He also felt a connection to the prisoners since they had produced ‘wall paintings’. One panel shows the prisoner and his cell; the other is more abstract, an unconfined space.