Richard Hamilton

Richard Hamilton is widely regarded as the first Pop artist. He was born into a working-class family in London and, after leaving school, worked as an apprentice electrician while attending art classes. He was later expelled from the Royal Academy. Hamilton was significantly influenced by Marcel Duchamp, whom he befriended and later curated a retrospective for in the UK.

Hamilton's work often borrowed imagery from mass culture, recontextualizing it to convey political, literary, or social meanings. His painting The Citizen (1981–83), inspired by the "dirty protest" at Northern Ireland's Maze prison, depicts a prisoner in a cell smeared with feces, which Hamilton described as a materialization of Christian martyrdom. The title itself is a reference to James Joyce's Ulysses. Hamilton was a key member of the Independent Group, which explored culture from high art to popular forms.12