Throughout his career, Richard Hambleton returned to the myths and anxieties embedded in American culture. From the ominous silhouettes of his celebrated Shadow Men to his later cowboys, he explored archetypes of fear, violence, swagger and individualism. His fascination with the American West offered particularly fertile ground: the cowboy, already transformed by cinema and advertising into an emblem of freedom and masculine self-reliance, allowed Hambleton to examine the distance between American mythology and lived reality.

In his Marlboro Man works, Hambleton approached this familiar icon through the imagery of cigarette advertising, obscuring and transforming the heroic cowboy with his characteristic black paint. The gesture both invokes and unsettles the romanticism of the frontier, while the vigorous handling of paint recalls the physical language of Abstract Expressionism and Action Painting. Created in dialogue with the appropriated Marlboro imagery of his contemporary Richard Prince, Hambleton’s cowboys offer a distinctly darker meditation on the mythology of the American West and the seductive image of the rugged individual.