About

In the 1980s Hamilton created a body of work about The Troubles in Northern Ireland. He made three diptych paintings portraying an Irish Republican prisoner - a dirty protester, at the Maze Prison - a parading loyalist Orangeman and a British soldier on patrol. The citizen, 1985, and The orangeman, 1990, illustrated below, are related prints. The citizen, both the painting and the dye-transfer print, are based on stills selected from footage of an Irish Republican prisoner, on hunger strike and dirty protest in the H block. Hamilton was struck by his resemblance to images of Christian …