"I painted the town black."
Richard Hambleton (1952-2017) is the godfather of street art and one of the most significant and singular artists to emerge from New York's downtown scene of the 1980s. Working alongside Jean-Michel Basquiat and Keith Haring, he created the iconic Shadowman series - explosive black silhouettes painted covertly onto the walls of New York, the Berlin Wall, and cities across Europe - establishing a visual language that laid the foundation for every major street artist who followed, from Blek le Rat to Banksy. After a decade of near-invisibility driven by addiction and poverty, his work was spectacularly rediscovered from 2009 onwards, with auction prices surging dramatically following his death in 2017. His works are held in the permanent collections of MoMA New York, the Brooklyn Museum, and the Andy Warhol Museum.