Few artists have captured the volatility of urban life and the ghostly presence of the figure like Richard Hambleton. Known as the ‘Godfather of Street Art’, Hambleton was the progenitor of the genre’s shadowy psychodrama. He rose to prominence in early 1980s New York with his now-iconic “Shadowman” figures—dramatic, dancing silhouettes painted in alleyways, doorways, and derelict lots, at once celebratory and omnipresent. These forms would later make their way onto canvas, preserving the visceral immediacy of the street within the formal frame of painting.

The present work stands entirely apart within this renowned oeuvre. It is the only known shadow painting in which Hambleton represents a Native American figure - rendered in the same spectral style as his cowboy counterparts, but possessed with a striking sense of stillness and resolve. The figure’s outline is unmistakable: feathered headdress, elongated limbs, and stance that projects both strength and dignity. Executed in Hambleton’s signature black pigment with flicks and trails of splattered paint, the figure appears to hover, caught between myth and materiality.

The painting carries particular art-historical weight in the context of Hambleton’s career. A peer of Basquiat and Haring, Hambleton was unique in his embrace of figuration as a evocative device - eschewing text and narrative for a raw visual grammar rooted in silhouette and surface. With Shadow Indian, he reaches beyond the downtown lexicon to engage with deeper, more ambivalent themes of American identity, myth-making, and cultural resonance. The image is both potent and poetical: its ritualistic dance offers a talisman of our American past, made manifest through Hambleton’s characteristic urgency of line and gesture.