Anthea Hamilton

Anthea Hamilton is a UK-based artist who creates multi-media installations that resemble theatrical stages or film sets and incorporate arrangements of prop-like objects, references to modernist paintings, and appropriated images of pop culture icons such as blow-ups of John Travolta in John Travolta, Bust-like, 2012. Often playing with images and materials associated with beauty and desire, Hamilton repeatedly uses sculptural cut-outs of film stills or women’s legs made from transparent plastic and wooden shapes based on Modernist depictions of female nudes such as the curvy abstracted figure found in her 2007 piece The Piano Lesson, based on Fernand Léger’s 1921 painting Le Grand Déjeuner. Through a range of image sources and her stage-like environments, such as gallery walls painted with Chroma Key blue paint used in film or TV studios, Hamilton explores our associations to surreal and seductive cultural imagery while examining the histories of art, film, and performance.

Hamilton had her first solo show at Chisenhale Gallery in London and has exhibited internationally at the Tate Britain, London; the Kunstverein Freiburg, Germany; La Salle de bans, Lyon; and the Palais de Tokyo, Paris. Her first solo show in the U.S. was at Sculpture Center in New York in 2015. Recently she designed the poster for the London 2012 Olympic Games and presented a performance at the Tate Modern in London for The Tanks: Art in Action series, 2012.