Derek Boshier

Providing a thematic overview of the multifarious work produced by Derek Boshier (1937-2024) from the post-war period to the digital age, this fascinating publication reveals how Boshier’s deceptively playful imagery offers analytical commentaries on societal issues and the fragility and fragmentation of human identity. Among contemporaries such as Peter Blake, Pauline Boty and Peter Phillips, Boshier was a central figure in the British Pop Art movement. Embracing Pop sensibilities, his early work juxtaposed figurative painting and imagery to call attention to nuclear anxieties and the growing consumerism of 1960s Britain. Yet this is just one aspect of Boshier's remarkable artistic journey, which has drawn in painting, drawing, sculpture, film, graphic design and printmaking. The book's broad sweep includes recent paintings and drawings created in America at the height of the #MeToo and Black Lives Matter movements, and features commentaries by artists, academics, curators and writers who explore how Boshier's ground-breaking activity interrogates truth and logic, fantasy and reality in the modern age. With contributions by James Cahill, Philip Colbert, Eddie Chambers, Susan Compo, Rachele Dini, Inga Fraser, Jann Haworth, Leslie Jones, Emily Langridge, Gregory Salter, Penny Slinger and John Stezaker.