Interior II 1964

Richard Hamilton made this painting, Interior II, with oil, collage, and mixed media. It's like a stage set, isn't it? There’s this photo of a glamorous woman, maybe a celebrity, in a doorway, and then all around her are these geometric shapes and planes in pastel colors, floating in the air. I can imagine Hamilton working on this, layering these elements like he's building a collage in real space. He's playing with this tension between flatness and depth, between the real and the represented. Look at how the textures shift—the smooth flatness of the walls, the shiny photo, the matte surface of the tv screen. The way Hamilton mixes media, he’s asking us to think about the relationship between the image and the object, between art and life. It reminds me of Magritte, but with a Pop Art twist. Like he's saying, “Hey, what is real anyway?” And the painting becomes this playful puzzle that we get to solve.