Richard III, from the suite Richard Hamilton

This suite of photographic screenprints, which depict British pop artist Richard Hamilton (1922–2011), explore how tone and colour affect visual perception. Harold Cohen created the prints using the halftone process, a printing technique of converting a photographic image into a series of dots to simulate the continuous tone range of the image. The more dots, the greater the image clarity; the larger the dots, the darker the printed area.

Cohen used the same image of Hamilton for all eight prints. ‘Richard H’ (not present in the Art Gallery’s suite) is a straightforward black-and-white reproduction, while ‘Richard I–VII’ were each printed using three different colours: one colour for the background, one for the dot image and the third for the shadow. For example, ‘Richard I’ has a yellow background, magenta image and green shadow, ‘Richard V’ a magenta background, green image and black shadow. By playing with image resolution along with tone and colour, Cohen has created optical effects that challenge the viewers ability to interpret what they see.