A selection of works by Derek Boshier in the collection of the Imperial College Healthcare Charity go on display this week.
Continue reading Derek Boshier: Inside The Mind Of A Pop Artist at Charing X Hospital
Thanks to Pace London for providing scans of the showcard for Derek Boshier’s spring 1965 exhibition at Robert Fraser Gallery in Mayfair’s Duke Street.
This handsome fold-out poster is for the exhibition Potential Architecture, which opens at London’s Ambika P3 on March 11.
Derek Boshier’s 1966 work Sam Spade is given prominence in A Strong Sweet Smell Of Incense, the exhibition dedicated to the connoisseurship of the late art dealer Robert Fraser.
Boshier was a client until he foreswore painting for a decade or more in 1968. This was a particularly difficult period for Fraser, who was jailed over the infamous Redlands drug bust at Rolling Stone Keith Richards’ house the previous year.
Boshier has recounted how he became so frustrated over Fraser’s unwillingness to pass on payments in the 60s that he and his friend, the poet Christopher Logue, once broke into the Duke Street gallery and retrieved works Fraser had refused to release in lieu.
Continue reading A Strong Sweet Smell Of Incense: Derek Boshier at the Robert Fraser show
Surrender After is the title of photographer/director Jean-Francois Carly’s show of nudes opening at Forge & Co in east London next week.
Continue reading Tender + tough: Jean-Francois Carly’s Surrender After portraits
There’s a nice story behind this portrait of the late fashion designer Thea Porter, whose talents are celebrated at the just-opened exhibition at London’s Fashion & Textiles Museum.
During preparations for the exhibition and the accompanying book, the curator and fashion historian Laura McLaws Helms visited British artist Penny Slinger, who had made feathered masks and modeled in a catwalk show for Porter in the early 70s.
Continue reading Started in 1986, recently completed portrait of Thea Porter celebrates show at London’s Fashion & Textile Museum
“Without hesitation, CLASH 2nd Song book is a masterpiece of graphic art”
Guy Brett, writer/curator
Interrogating materials for the Derek Boshier monograph has brought home the meshing of the artist’s sensibilities with punk in the 70s.
Continue reading Derek Boshier: Clash art guru + original punk rocker!
‘I’ve always liked what Goethe said: “The greatest thing a person can achieve is astonishment”.’
Derek Boshier
This is a delight. The magus Derek Boshier giving a Tate masterclass in life drawing from 2013:
Rethink/Re-Entry, the monograph of Boshier’s life’s work I am editing, is published this autumn by Thames & Hudson.
I’m looking forward to participating in ShowStudio’s live broadcast discussion of today’s Louis Vuitton A/W 15 menswear show in Paris.
Vuitton artistic director Kim Jones has been trailing the show on his Instagram feed with tantalising hints as to the direction and content. Jones’ A/W 15 collaborators include Judy Blame, Nellee Hooper and Mark Lebon – all names associated with the late shoemaker John Moore’s magical 80s north-east London art/fashion space The House Of Beauty & Culture.
Continue reading Magical: House Of Beauty & Culture 34-36 Stamford Road N1 (254 7794)
What is Metamodernism?
In the 90s and the early 2000s it’s fair to say we grew up with a particular outlook on life, one of irony, of deconstruction and cynicism. This was noticeable in the music of Nirvana and Radiohead, in the books of Michel Houellebecq and Bret Easton Ellis, and we saw it in the arts with the YBAs and Jeff Koons. This is very much a sensibility that spoke to us, that we embraced.
That time was summed up by a sense of boredom in culture. This is it? And what now?
Throughout the 2000s we began noticing – as many people did and many have written about this – slight changes. First you get the complete reappraisal of writers such as David Foster Wallace, who started in the 90s but suddenly became big in the early 2000s. And you had sincere movies by Wes Anderson and Michel Gondry. This was all very different from the kind of stuff we grew up with. Something was changing. The irony of Nirvana, the desperation of Radiohead, the cynicism of Michel Houellebecq were replaced by something that was at once still cynical, still ironic and had an acknowledgement of how the world worked, but at the same time seemed to want more.
Continue reading Metamodernism: Post-irony, new forms of sincerity and informed naivety