“Richard Hambleton and His Contemporaries”: Al Diaz, Ken Hiratsuka, Scot Borofsky

PRESS NIGHT RECEPTION:  Wednesday July 21st, 6-8PM, @Ideal Glass Studios 9West. 8th street

This exhibition will explore the flourishing of the illegal street art movement in New York City in the 1980s through four of its most important and influential early creators and conceptualists. Whilst each artist is a maverick with a highly distinctive vision and manner of working, this exhibition will demonstrate how the street art movement threaded together the strands of Modern Art in this period – political art; performance art; earthworks; site-specific installation; neo-expressionism – and created a radical new world of artistic creation. By denying the commercial world of the gallery and the academic world of the museum and instead plowing art back into the streets and public environment, (often at night and under high risk of arrest) these artists harkened back to the earliest and most fundamental impulses of human expression; creating art that merged with its environment, changed it, challenged it, created through destruction and made the urban wastes of 1980s New York fecund again. In 2021, as the City re-forms after the ravages of the pandemic, the vision of these artists has become particularly potent once again.

The inventor and Godfather of street art is Richard Hambleton. His figurative work in adhesive photographs and gestural paint and spray paint – “I Only Have Eyes for You” and “Shadow Figures” – took Neo-Expressionism into the dangerous streets for the first time. The dark, lonely doorways and sidewalks on which he painted his hundreds of near life-sized figures becoming part of the artwork, both feeding off and reflecting the fear and menace of the City.

Al Diaz can be described as a street art conceptual Textualist. From early graffiti tags to spray painted social and political statements on city walls he went on to create his famous “WET PAINT” series. The artist worked with existing banal public signage to collage surreal, subversive often poignant anagrams. These were then re-installed back into the New York City subway for riders to be “disturbed puzzled” by, ignore.

Scot Borofsky is a Symbolist of the streets. During the 1980s, his inspiration lay in using modern urban ruins and spray paint to emulate ancient ruins; often spending months in Mexico working on drawings of symbols on paper before returning to NYC to translate them into installations in dangerous and desolate city environments. His ‘Pattern Walk’ can be seen as a one block sized urban earthwork, carrying street art up to a formal level in Modernist conceptual tho

Ken Hiratsuka worked with hammer and chisel to create literal street art – painstakingly carving his urban petroglyphs directly into the sidewalks of the city in a never ending line of intricate, swirling designs underfoot. Hiratsuka refuses the Western sculptural tradition of creating form from stone, and instead creates with what he finds, his patterns synthesizing with the City itself. Scarred and ineradicable, linking the most ancient and the most modern.

For additional information or to schedule a viewing, please contact

SALOMON ARTS GALLERY
83 Leonard Street, 4th Floor,
New York, NY 10013

VIEWING BY APPOINTMENT ONLY.
please contact us at  212-966-1917
or via email at gallery@salomonarts.com