E F H E R L T Y E T UT O

A I N kE t h h r I g

“If anything, street art is like a pop-up ad and that’s what I love about it.”

Born Franco Campanella in Chicago in 1991, Lefty Out There became increasingly interested in art during his teenage years, when he visited museums, posted stickers across his hometown, and drew and sketched constantly in the classroom. He soon became involved in the city’s burgeoning street art scene, starting to develop his now iconic patterns by using the urban landscape as his canvas. The interlocking “squiggles”, rendered both in colour and in monochrome, appear as hypnotic and almost spiritual as they reproduce and multiply endlessly across every surface.

Lefty Out There taps into the synergy between repetition and the divine, depicting the world as a constantly evolving network of interconnections. His public murals can now be spotted across the cities of the USA, Asia and Europe. Incorporating new technologies such as lasers, LED boxes and computers into his process of creation, his artworks have since grown into large scale installations for prestigious locations like Nobu, club E11EVEN, Chotto Matte and the Ambassador Hotel in Chicago. His growing recognition has also led him to work on major fashion campaigns for NYFW and Nike.

While the overarching leitmotif of his iconic “squiggles” remains prevalent throughout his newer works, it is blended into experimentations with different materials and geometric abstraction. His works often reference minimalist Masters, for example Mondrian (2019) with its interlocking hooks against a block colour backdrop, painted in acrylic on wood. There are also nods to the psychedelic aesthetic of Op Art in his series of black-and-white works on wood.

Represented by Maddox Gallery, his works have been exhibited in commercial galleries and pop-ups in Los Angeles, New York, Miami and Mexico City.

LEFTY OUT THERE

PATINA, 2023

Corten Steel, Acrylic, Maple 117 x 117 x 4 cm

LEFTY OUT THERE

COUNTERBALANCE, 2023

“I painted the town black. They could represent watchmen or danger or the shadows of a human body after a nuclear holocaust or even my own shadow.”

Born in 1952 in Vancouver, Richard Hambleton studied at the Vancouver School of Art before creating his first significant series, the Image Mass Murder works in 1976. These powerful graffiti paintings imitated the chalk outlines of victims’ bodies drawn by police during investigations and gained Hambleton the recognition both of the mainstream press and the art world.

He travelled to New York in 1979, where he met pioneers like Keith Haring and Jean-Michel Basquiat. His famous Shadowman works started popping up across the streets of New York, in the shape of an all-black human silhouette as a reminder of the rising crime rates in the city. These quickly spread onto the pages of local and international newspapers, putting Hambleton on the map as one of the leading voices of street art. He continued his Shadowman series across European cities such as Venice, Berlin and Paris, including 17 black silhouettes painted onto the Berlin Wall.

Alongside his public works, he also started producing paintings in the studio and showing more commercially. A new variation of the iconic character depicted on his canvases was the Marlboro Man , a similar shadowy figure on a horse. Hambleton’s commercial success was marked by fashion collaborations with the likes of Vivienne Westwood and Malcolm McLaren, who used his signature imagery in their collections.

The artist gradually withdrew himself from the public eye and the art world alike around the 1990s, shaken by the death of his peers, Haring and Basquiat, as well as struggling with drug addiction. He emerged with a new set of works called Beautiful Paintings (2007), which used bright colours and abstract painterly brushstrokes. Their reception by the New York art scene was rather negative and led him to sink into obscurity. In 2009, a notable Richard Hambleton exhibition in New York, in collaboration with Giorgio Armani, spanned his entire career. Including his Shadowman and Marlboro Man works, it went on to tour internationally. Other exhibitions include ‘Art in the Streets’ at MoCA, Los Angeles (2011), ‘Richard Hambleton: I Only Have Eyes For You’ at Woodward Gallery in New York, and ‘Richard Hambleton | Shadowman’ at Chase Contemporary in New York.

Hambleton’s oeuvre received renewed attention after his death in 2017 through the documentary Shadowman , which premiered at the Tribeca Film Festival in the same year. This saw a critical rise in his market prices and the curatorial interest in his work, causing his pieces to claim record auction results within months. His paintings are included in the collections of prominent institutions such as the Andy Warhol Museum, the New Museum of Contemporary Art, the Brooklyn Museum, and Queens Museum in the United States, and the Checkpoint Charlie Museum in Berlin. As ‘The ‘Godfather of Street Art’, Hambleton’s lasting influence on the world of street art, as well as the power of his symbolic imagery and activism, resonate with a newfound force today.