Richard Hambleton x Dark Circle

Woodbury House Contemporary Art’s core ethos is to “bring art to the masses” and this collaboration sits at the very centre of this manifesto. Both fashion and art merchandise were produced in a collaborative project allowing clients to own a piece of Hambleton’s work in some form; be that the original, the one-of-a-kind jacket, the sweatshirt, t-shirt or ashtray. Dark Circle worked closely with Woodbury House’s team of experts to select twenty-five of Richard Hambleton’s works for the project, including pieces from the Horse and Rider series, Stop Sign and the artist’s iconic shadowman figures. From these pieces, Dark Circle produced twenty-five one-of-a-kind jackets, which were available to purchase as artworks exclusively through Woodbury House.

The pattern for the jackets were designed as a replica of Hambleton’s distinctive painting jacket, exploring the notion that through its customary place in the artist’s work process, the garment itself has arguably become a masterpiece in its own right. Each of the artworks were laid out by the Dark Circle design team and digitally printed onto 3.5m of Panama Canvas – a fabric sourced for its likeness to the original canavases used by Hambleton – before being constructed into unique new pieces of art. A sixteen-piece capsule collection entitled Shadowman, were released to coincide with the launch of the jackets and included a limited edition run of wearable, accessible art including hoodies, sweatshirts, t-shirts and hats, as well as collectable art merchandise in the form of skateboard decks and ashtrays.

The collection marries Hambleton’s paintings with Dark Circle’s signature typographic approach to design, referencing original newspaper headlines from Hambleton’s anonymous 1980’s New York street art origins: “Who is the Shadowman?” across t-shirts and sweatshirts..