Collectable

Richard Hamilton: ‘I determined to make a new perspective projection’

Richard Hamilton. Five Tyres Remoulded (portfolio), 1971

collectable

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.