Derek Boshier, the pioeering British Pop artist, has died. Studying alongside the likes of David Hockney, Allen Jones, Peter Philips, and R.B. Kitaj, at the Royal College of Art in the early 1960s, and imbibing the writing of Marshall McLuhan, he established the turn towards Pop through his participation in the landmark 1962 travelling Young Contemporaries exhibition.
Works such as The Identi-Kit Man (1962), in which a figure seems to have been squeezed out of a tube of toothpaste, the arms boasting the red-and-white stripes of the Colgate brand, were a commentary on the exploding consumerist society of the time and the Americanisation of British culture. The young artist noted of that work that the figure ‘represents me (us), the spectator, participant, player, or cog in the wheel – the amorphous “us”’.
His acute social commentary brought him huge attention, but Boshier was not interested in capitalising on the success, instead going travelling, first to India, and then America (where he moved to permanently in the 1990s), embracing painting styles from figurative Neo-Expressionism and abstract Op Art to films and a dadaist style of collage making. This restlessness confounded critics but won him fans among his peers and younger artists thereafter (a recent monograph included laudatory contributions from the likes of John Stezaker and Penny Slinger). While never reaching the name recognition of Hockney and Kitaj, Boshier nonetheless exhibited regularly, notching up over a hundred exhibitions in a career that lasted over six decades.
His work also reached many more than might ever step into a gallery. Boshier designed the art for David Bowie’s 1979 LP Lodger, which featured a photograph shot by Brian Duffy and Boshier’s gatefold collage of found images including running water, an infant, wristwatches and the corpse of Che Guevera. He later went on to produce the work for Bowie’s 1984 album Let’s Dance, which depicts the singer in boxing gloves with Boshier’s 1980 work A Darker Side of Houston projected on the singer’s bare chest, as well as the stage sets for Bowie’s 1983 Serious Moonlight tour. In 1979 he collaborated with The Clash on CLASH: 2nd Songbook, a collection of drawings and paintings released alongside the band’s album Give ‘Em Enough Rope.
Boshier’s 2021 exhibition Icarus and K-Pop at Gazelli Art House featured large-scale works inspired by the Korean TV show King of Mask Singers and the myth of Icarus, through which Boshier explored the themes of ambition and failure. In 2023 the Wolverhampton Art Gallery staged a retrospective, building on a previous surveys in 2017 at Night Gallert in Los Angeles and in 2019 at Mostyn, in North Wales.
