RICHARD HAMILTON | Toaster Deluxe 3

Gagosian Gallery, London
Acquired from the above by the present owner

London, Gagosian Gallery, Richard Hamilton: Toaster Deluxe, April - May 2009

Colour: The colours in the catalogue illustration are fairly accurate, although the background is slightly lighter and warmer in the original and illustration fails to fully convey the reflective qualities of the toasters. Condition: This work is in very good condition. Very close inspection reveals some superficial scuffs and handling marks to the artist's frame.
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Born of his earlier work Toaster, which Richard Hamilton completed in 1967 and is currently held in the collection of the Tate, London, the toaster motif became one of Hamilton’s most enduring and important subject matters. In the Toaster Deluxe series, Hamilton returns and expands on this theme to produce thirteen different variations of his original print. Toaster Deluxe 3, 2008, resonates with the earlier work, however, the new print has been modernised and set against various digitally generated backgrounds. These diaphanous backgrounds perfectly blend other household items, underlining one of the key tenets of Hamilton’s practice: technological advancement. The series was inspired by the Braun toaster and Hamilton held its designer, Dieter Rams, in high regard: "My admiration for the work of Dieter Ram is intense and I have for many years been uniquely attracted towards his design sensibility; so much so that his consumer products have come to occupy a place in my heart and consciousness that the Mont Saint-Victoire did in Cézanne's." (Richard Hamilton, Richard Hamilton: Prints and Multiples 1939-2002, Dusseldorf 2003, p. 78). Replacing the Braun logo with his own name, the artist takes ownership of the work, whilst simultaneously enacting socio-economic critique of the monopoly of mass culture. Born in 1922 in London, Hamilton was throughout his life exposed to the fast-paced lifestyle and rapid technological advancements of the twentieth century, which he transcends in his working methods. Placing technology at the very heart of his practice, Hamilton was the first artist to devote himself to an ongoing study of the digital manipulation of images and in his work as he continued to use the most advanced image-processing resources.

In Toaster Deluxe 3, Hamilton breaks down the traditional binary boundaries between industrial design and creative art production. Indeed, the interweaving of art and design is utterly fundamental to his practice; he was both a design teacher at the University of Newcastle and employed as a designer for Encounter magazine in 1956. With the Toaster Deluxe series, the artist sets to celebrate not just the design of singular object of industry which served to simplify our needs, but by creating reflections and placing the object with various backgrounds he makes the viewer consider the wider socio-economic context of the object. Toaster Deluxe 3 gives new context to the ‘assisted ready-mades’ once created by Marcel Duchamp. The object is now dependent on being appreciated both as an object of art and as a commodity as Hamilton explores the relationship between fine art, product design and popular culture, and the fragile boundaries between these specifications in the arts today.