Derek Boshier

Derek Boshier (born 1937, in Portsmouth) is an English artist, among the first proponents of British pop art.

He works in various media including painting, drawing, collage, and sculpture.

Derek Boshier attended Yeovil School of art in Somerset, England from 1953-1957 (B.F.A.).

He attended the Royal College of Art in London, 1959-1962 alongside David Hockney, Pauline Boty, Allen Jones and Peter Phillips, receiving his M.F.A. 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.

After graduating, he spent a year traveling in India on an Indian government scholarship.

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 materials 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.

Notable works that came out of Boshier's time at the Royal College show his differentiating concern with political action and discourse.

The film forever placed Boshier at Pop Art's origins and anointed him one of its British kings.

Boshier served as an instructor at the Central School of Art and Design, London from 1963-1979 and concurrently at the Royal Collage of Art London from 1973–1979.

Never one to allow his message to be governed by any particular medium, at the 1964 The New Generation show at the Whitechapel Gallery he exhibited large shaped canvases with vibrant areas of evenly applied colour.

Boshier's work was included in the exhibition "Around the Automobile" in 1965 at The Museum of Modern Art, New York.

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.

As is a theme within Boshier's life and work, he and Russell became friends and Boshier later played the role of John Everett Millais in Russell's television film Dante's Inferno (1967); his girlfriend Gala Mitchell played Jane Morris.

Feeling that painting was too not able to properly carry the assault of images in every day life Boshier stopped painting for 13 years, instead using photographs, films and book art that was often political.

It is at this time that Bosher's interest in technologies of representation became obvious.

Through this topic he explored his other interests of the close connection between life and art, accessibility of art and the related breakdown between high and low art.

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.

Addressing the question of what shapes his work, Boshier once stated "Most important is life itself, my sources tend to be current events, personal events, social and political situations, and a sense of place and places".

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.

He has been commissioned by David Bowie, The Clash, and The Pretty Things.

After making a name for himself as one of Pop Art's elite, starting in the 1970s Boshier created work that broke out of the genre including progressively more graphic figurative paintings and hard-edged, non representational canvases on the border of Op Art. His work in photography, screen-print, film, collage, and assemblage has led critic Jonathan Griffin to argue that Derek Boshier, although foremost a painter, is most vastly a contemporary artist than just a pop artist.

During the early 1970s Boshier taught at Central School of Art and Design where one of his pupils was John Mellor (later known as Joe Strummer of The Clash).

This led to Boshier designing The Clash's second song book which included a collection of drawings and paintings released in conjunction with the album Give 'Em Enough Rope.

His groundbreaking exhibition "Lives: An exhibition of artists whose work is based on other people's lives" subsequently took place at The Hayward Gallery in 1979.

While using many mediums, Boshier always continued to draw and it is through this drawings that the viewer is most connected to the consistent way Boshier uses the concepts of style, graphic, and representation to use art to leave his own signature, as it were, on the popular elements we borrows.

In 1979 at the request of David Bowie, portrait photographer Brian Duffy introduced the two artists.

This meeting resulted in a 37-year friendship that lasted until Bowie's death.

Boshier designed David Bowie cover art for Lodger and Let's Dance.

Boshier moved to Houston Texas in 1980, after accepting a one-year visiting artist position at the University of Houston, and then joined the faculty there from 1981–1992.

He moved back to England 1992-1997 and later joined the faculty of the California Institute of Arts in Los Angeles in 1997, where he has lived ever since.

Though associated with the art and culture of both London and Los Angeles, Boshier has also lived in Houston, Somerset and Wales.