A Box Of Bubbles is the special edition of the forthcoming book The Wild World of Barney Bubbles.
Continue reading A Box Of Bubbles: Limited edition up for grabs now
Book design
Fluoro DIY: PRINT! booklet with introduction by Claire Catterall, essay by me, design by Scott King + mind map fold-out poster designed by Rhys Atkinson
The booklet we have produced to accompany new Somerset House exhibition PRINT! Tearing It Up is in keeping with the show’s fluoro punk aesthetic and DIY theme.
‘Suburban voodoo is what he did do, so well’: Last two days of Barney Bubbles exhibition at Rob Tufnell London
“In graphics, in the music business at least, Barney pioneered the use of everyday objects in his work. He could see the design and the beauty in the apparently banal”
Suzanne Spiro, artist
The Barney Bubbles exhibition Optics & Semantics at London gallery Rob Tufnell closes tomorrow evening; if you have a chance, do go along and enjoy the late graphic arts maestro’s unique celebrations of the mundane and workaday.
”I love the book… your work cascades over the decades’: David Bowie’s last email to Derek Boshier
I just had to write and tell you how much I love the book that has just been published. Your work really cascades over the decades and is utterly real and convincing.
Extract of email from David Bowie to Derek Boshier, November 2015
I guess it can be told now. David Bowie was at one stage going to contribute to Rethink/Re-entry, the monograph of the artist Derek Boshier, with whom the late rock star had worked in the late 70s and early 80s.
‘Blowing up bridges so there is no way back’: Malcolm McLaren, Situationists + Sex Pistols remembered by Fred Vermorel in new exhibition catalogue
Considered as an artwork, a two-and-a-half year project, and in its own terms, McLaren’s Sex Pistols’ was as seminal and resonant as Picasso’s Guernica.
Only this was a masterpiece made not of paint and canvas but of headlines and scandal, scams and factoids, rumour and fashion, slogans, fantasies and images and (I almost forgot) songs, all in a headlong scramble to auto-destruction.
For it was equally a Situationist treatise-by-example, the unremitting and obdurate core being McLaren’s grasp of the theory of situations as proposed by the SI.
Indeed, the story of the Pistols is a Situationist textbook of how to create situations from which there is no return. You refuse to negotiate, to compromise, to be co-opted, you exacerbate every crisis and recklessly play loser wins and then you blow up all the bridges so then there is no way back.
We are then forced to invent another future. Or maybe simply relish the mess, “the ecstasy of making things worse”.
From Fred Vermorel’s memoir which appears exclusively in the new exhibition catalogue.
The catalogue for the exhibition Eyes For Blowing Up Bridges is now available.
The lavishly illustrated 100-page book includes a foreword by John Hansard Gallery’s Ros Carter and Stephen Foster, my introduction, an essay by co-curator David Thorp and a specially commissioned memoir of Malcolm McLaren and his connections to post-war radicals by his art-school friend and collaborator Fred Vermorel.
The man who fell to earth: Derek Boshier wows the crowds at sell-out book launch and private view
Last night’s book launch and private view for the Derek Boshier monograph and new exhibition at Flowers Gallery in Cork Street, central London, was a great success.