Alex Hamilton

Alex Hamilton was born in 1969 in the Great Karoo, went to high school in the Little Karoo and then moved to Cape Town to study Textile Design in 1988. After a year in the army, he pursued a career in the arts and has been a full time artist since 1993. In 1997 he opened his own gallery, the celebrated "Bang the Gallery", specialising in young emerging artists and Pop art.

In 1999 he moved into his first "uber" studio and closed "Bang" in 2002 to concentrate on his own work. During this time Hamilton exhibited extensively in Europe with solo exhibitions in Mallorca, Spain, Stuttgart, Germany and Dublin, Ireland. During this period, he also formed a professional relationship with Knysna Fine Art and has, to date, presented six solo exhibitions at the various venues of this gallery.

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In 2005, Hamilton moved into his first studio with a specific gallery space attached. It is at this location that he first exhibited his now signature stencil Street/Pop art style with an exhibition called "Cast & Crew - The History of Popular Culture" with a staggering 1000 individual, hand-cut stencil portraits. The success of this show led to numerous other exhibitions, commissions and projects and Hamilton has since diversified the portrait theme into landscape and architectural layered stencil studies. In 2011, he moved into an even bigger (470m2) studio space occupying the entire top floor of an industrial building in Woodstock, Cape Town and created a studio gallery where today he hosts solo and informal group exhibitions with emerging artists and also houses his increasingly varied personal collections and library.

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He also hosts occasional informal exhibition events, "Margarita Night Mash-Up" providing a platform for independent and alternative artists to exhibit their work.In 2012, Hamilton produced a series of architectural stencil works with the Karoo town of Prince Albert as subject and after the opening of the exhibition was presented with his own permanent gallery space: The Alex Hamilton Gallery - Prince Albert.

Earlier this year (2013), he extended the now 2000-plus stencil archive to focus on South African iconography for a solo exhibition "Amper Almal" at the 19th Absa KKNK arts festival in Oudtshoorn.

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