Derek Boshier - WORKS ON PAPER 1955-2007

About

Derek Boshier first came to prominence with his paintings as a student at the Royal College of Art in London in the early 1960s, where he studied with David Hockney, Allen Jones, R.B.Kitaj and others in the British Pop Art movement.Subsequently he has worked in many other media: drawing, printmaking, film, books, three-dimensional object making, installations, photography, and in graphics, working with popular music groups such as The Clash and with David Bowie.This major exhibition of some 240 works charts Boshier's entire oeuvre in drawing from his Royal College days up to his present practice in Los Angeles, where he now lives and works. One of the key qualities of his career has been his refusal to forge a single personal style, instead drawing on new movements for the possibilities they give to develop a voluble artistic lexicon.In his drawings Boshier manipulates academic styles and the commercial devices deployed in consumer culture with intelligence, courage and wit. The paradoxical merges with the contradictory, the humorous with the tragic, the political with the seeming trivia of everyday life, as reality morphs into the imaginary and vice versa. The complexities of the drawings are often hidden by seemingly simple, cartoon-like appearances, but this impression is soon dispelled as subtleties and juxtapositions emerge.This important exhibition displays Boshier's fine disregard for the imposed ideas of the status quo in both the claustrophobic art world and the ever-changing world at large.