Marilyn Monroe, bodybuilding contestants and cut-outs of seaside postcards populate Richard Hamilton’s mixed-media gaze in this series taken from a survey of prints at the Alan Cristea Gallery, London. Having worked with Hamilton for 30 years, Cristea collected his original screen prints into his first posthumous print catalogue Richard Hamilton: Word and Image. Prints 1963-2007, in a year that will see the artist lauded with a major retrospective at Tate Modern and an ancillary show at the ICA. Hamilton's magpie approach to social chronicling extended to painting, sculpture, photography, typography and collage, bringing to the fore the themes of status, power and consumer culture in 1950s and 1960s Britain. It was a method that resulted in memorable art works that segued into the popular sphere, such as the 1968 cover of The Beatles’ White Album, and  “Swingeing London 67” a silk screen of the arrest of Mick Jagger and the art dealer Robert Fraser that he began the same year. Hamilton, who died in 2011, owed part of his multidisciplinary stance to James Joyce, who he discovered while conscripted into military service. “Joyce commands all matter of literary styles and combines them into unprecedented display of linguistic pyrotechnics,” he said. “Presenting an example that later freed me to try some implausible associations in painting.”

Richard Hamilton Word and Image, Prints 1963-2007 runs February 14 through March 22 at Alan Cristea Gallery.