Richard Hambleton valuation
Painted black shadow figures on New York walls in the early 1980s, and then largely disappeared.
Richard Hambleton was born in Vancouver in 1952 and by the late 1970s was working in New York, where he painted the Shadowmen: life-sized black figures, splashed and slashed onto walls and doorways in hundreds of locations across Lower Manhattan, positioned so that a passer-by met one suddenly at a corner.
What a work by Richard Hambleton is worth
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Bio
Richard Hambleton was born in Vancouver in 1952 and by the late 1970s was working in New York, where he painted the Shadowmen: life-sized black figures, splashed and slashed onto walls and doorways in hundreds of locations across Lower Manhattan, positioned so that a passer-by met one suddenly at a corner. He showed at the Venice Biennale alongside Haring and Basquiat, and was for a moment the third name in that group. Addiction and illness then removed him from view for two decades, and he lived and worked in extreme poverty on the Lower East Side until his death in 2017.
The market revived from around 2007 with a series of rediscovery exhibitions, and it is uneven. Shadowman paintings on canvas from the 1980s lead; the later Marlboro Man and horse-and-rider works are a separate group. Documentation is the recurring problem — records from the 1980s are thin, the artist's own habits made provenance difficult, and disputes over authorised versus unauthorised works and over posthumous editions have followed. Works removed from walls carry ownership questions. Certificates and a documented exhibition history matter more here than for most artists of the period.
Image Mass Murder, Venice and the Shadowman film
Before New York, Hambleton co-founded the Pumps Centre for Alternative Art in Vancouver, where he had his first solo exhibition in 1976, and from 1976 to 1978 he staged Image Mass Murder, painting police-style outlines around volunteer victims on the streets of fifteen cities in the United States and Canada. He showed at the Salvatore Ala Gallery in New York in 1984 and was included in the Venice Biennale in 1984 and 1988.
The rediscovery began with an exhibition of his Beautiful Paintings at Woodward Gallery in New York in 2007. A documentary about him, Shadowman, was first shown at the Tribeca Film Festival in 2017, the year he died. For a Shadowman on canvas, the date, any exhibition record and a certificate from a documented source are the things to look for.
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