Five Tyres Remoulded (portfolio) is the chronicle of a failure, which only technology could resolve. In 1964 Hamilton was unable to develop a complex study of the perspective of the form of a tyre and had abandoned the project. As the artist himself explained: ‘I determined to make a new and idealized perspective projection of the tread types which would give me the structure anew, and more precisely. After some months of work I found one evening that I had taken two hours to establish the position of five points among many thousands. It was clearly time to abandon the task.’ Six years later, a pioneering computer program by Fortran called Caper (Computer Aided perspective) allowed him to do it. The contradictions of space and their visual interpretation were some of the artist’s enduring themes.

WORKS IN THE COLLECTION BY RICHARD HAMILTON

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