Derek Boshier

Derek Boshier (19 June 1937 – 5 September 2024) was an English artist, among the first proponents of British pop art. He worked in various media including painting, drawing, collage, and sculpture. In the 1970s he shifted from painting to photography, film, video, assemblage, and installations, but he returned to painting by the end of the decade. His work uses popular culture and the mixing of high and low culture to confront government, revolution, sex, technology and war with subversive dark humor.

Boshier was commissioned by David Bowie, The Clash, and Pretty Things. He attended Yeovil School of Art (now Yeovil College) in Somerset from 1953-1957 (BA). He attended the Royal College of Art in London, 1959–1962 alongside David Hockney, Pauline Boty, Allen Jones and Peter Phillips, receiving his MA (RCA) in 1962.

The boredom of the previous few years of National Service in the Royal Engineers had been alleviated by reading the works of Marshall McLuhan. During his college years, his work was didactic, commenting on the space race, the all-powerful multinationals and the increasing Americanisation of English culture. Though associated with the art and culture of both London and Los Angeles, Boshier also lived in Houston, Somerset and Wales at different junctures.

Career

Royal College

Pop Goes the Easel While still at the Royal College of Art Derek Boshier appeared with Peter Blake, Pauline Boty and Peter Phillips in Pop Goes the Easel (1962), a film by Ken Russell for the BBC's Monitor series. A pioneering program, Monitor's editors encouraged Russell to be ambitious and the resulting film can also be seen as a collaboration, taking inspiration from the formal aesthetics and themes within work of its artist-subjects. Like the work of Boshier, the film was a spliced and shuffled collage that startled its viewers. Pop Goes the Easel established the similarities that united this group of pop artists while also establishing their differences. Boshier emerged as relatively articulate and concerned with social issues and critical writings on the impact of advertising on social identity and democratic politics. Though he used the visual elements of pop art such as flags maps and comics, we can see in his early work a marked political concern, especially with current events and expansion of American power. Boshier believed that, "The world's at peril," and that it was impossible to avoid being political. After 1966 he has used metal, coloured plastics, even neon light, the materials of the commercial sign maker, to create three-dimensional objects. Also he has experimented both with books and film. For Lodger, Boshier also designed the inner gatefold which featured a college of images representing the themes of life and death. Boshier also designed stage sets for Bowie. "Derek Boshier: Texas Works", Institute of Contemporary Arts, London 1982; "Fresh Paint, The Houston School" Museum of Fine Arts, Houston 1985 (traveling to P.S.1 Contemporary Art Center (now MoMA PS1), Long Island City, New York); "Derek Boshier: The Texas Years", Contemporary Art Museum, Houston 1995.

Boshier lived in Los Angeles, U.S..

Public collections Muzeum Sztuki Łódź, Poland Tate Gallery – his 1962 painting The Identi-Kit Man was purchased in 1971. The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston Museum of Modern Art, New York Wolverhampton Art Gallery, UK – The Stun (1979) & Untitled (1964)

Exhibition history Derek Boshier: Image in Revolt. Wolverhampton Art Gallery, UK. (7 October 2023 – 21 January 2024). Curated by Helen Little in collaboration with Wolverhampton Art Gallery.