The Way Forward: Derek Boshier and the Sixties: With works by: Peter Blake, Derek Boshier, Pauline Boty, Patrick Caulfield, David Hockney, Allen Jones, R.B. Kitaj, Peter Phillips, Richard Smith and Joe Tilson

Together with fellow RCA students David Hockney, Allen Jones, Peter Phillips and R. B. Kitaj, he participated in the landmark Young Contemporaries exhibition at R.B.A. Galleries London in 1962, which propelled Pop Art to public prominence. Among the first exponents of British Pop Art, Boshier distinguished himself from contemporaries such as Peter Blake and Pauline Boty through his unique brand of satirical social commentary. Two important paintings from this formative student period of Boshier’s work, Special K (1961) and W for Euthanasia (1962), represent twin poles of this art, though both combine narrative elements, references to moral dilemmas and to the human predicament as reflected in the news, advertising, consumerism and popular culture. Special K, one of Boshier’s key Pop works, takes its striking central motif from a popular American breakfast cereal manufactured by the multinational company Kellogg’s and combines it with a prescient reference to James Bond predating the first Bond film by a year - and the Thunderball movie by four years - and to the American-Russian space race in the rockets firing upwards into the letter K. Euthanasia, painted within living memory of the Nazi death camps active during the artist’s own early childhood, presents a sequence of generic figures alongside portraits of men protecting themselves with gas masks, as a caustic perspective on a subject that remains just as contentious today in the discussions now taking place about assisted dying.

As early as 1963 Boshier had developed a distinctive approach to abstraction, embracing shaped canvases and vibrant geometric compositions. Moving away from his earlier more figurative Pop works, Boshier began employing dynamic colour contrasts and layered forms to create spatial ambiguity and a sense of movement. Although aligned with the aesthetics of post-painterly abstraction in the US by artists such as Kenneth Noland and Ellsworth Kelly, Boshier’s pieces are infused with the experiences when travelling in India, alongside the British Pop iconography he was so instrumental in shaping.

Boshier’s journey to India was transformative — his immersion in Hindu mythology and street iconography informed a strikingly new visual language. He encountered imagery woven into everyday life, from temple icons to barbershop posters, shaping a body of work that blended Pop sensibilities with symbolic motifs. His return to the UK marked a decisive shift — his compositions became bolder, more architectural and attuned to the mechanics of visual perception.

The painting Viewer (1963) is a pivotal work in Boshier’s formal evolution. It contains figures depicted through viewfinder or window-like shapes and rainbow motifs, but departs from a rectangular canvas format through the asymmetric shaped support, reinforcing the illusion of depth in the composition. This work speaks to Boshier’s enduring fascination with how media, advertising and urban space influence perception.

Paintings from this period were showcased in the seminal New Generation exhibition at Whitechapel Art Gallery (1964) and at Robert Fraser Gallery (1965). They interrogate perception and representation through complex spatial arrangements and optical interplay. This experimentation led to bold, structured abstractions that shared affinities with the architectural rhythms of urban space. Shaped canvases such as Highlights (1966), with its dramatic array of inverted triangles, explore the illusion of depth through geometric fragmentation.

Reflecting on his own practice, Boshier once remarked: “I like to think of them as Pop abstraction. I looked at neon signs and that’s where it came out. India changed my life. I became a much more tolerant person. And I became a fatalist. Fatalists are optimists.”

The latter half of the 1960s saw Boshier increasingly engage with conceptual and political currents in art. Questioning the function of painting in an era of mass-media saturation, he expanded his practice to incorporate ready-made materials, film and text-based works, aligning himself with socially engaged artmaking. His active participation in political movements — campaigning against the Vietnam War, nuclear armament and systemic racism — underscored his commitment to art as a tool for cultural critique.

Gazelli artist and contemporary of Boshier, Jann Haworth, describes these paintings as “a conversation stopper... no pigeonholing into Op or Pop; the painting is silent vision. A space at the heart of art town, a time and place to indulge in just looking, taking a long moment.” They embody Boshier’s ability to balance precision with raw energy, a visual dynamism that continues to resonate today.

Complementing the presentation of Boshier’s paintings from the 1960s in the gallery’s main space will be a selection of works by artists who were also part of the contingent at the Royal College of Art associated with the rise of Pop Art in Britain: from the 1959 intake with Boshier are R. B. Kitaj, David Hockney, Allen Jones and Peter Phillips; Pauline Boty, who began her studies a year earlier in the Stained Glass department and became a fast friend; Patrick Caulfield, who arrived at the College a year after Boshier; and three artists, Peter Blake, Joe Tilson and Richard Smith, who had completed their studies at the College in the mid-1950s but who became friends, mentors, and sources of inspiration to the younger artists including Boshier himself. Ken Russell’s celebrated BBC film Pop Goes the Easel, which introduced Pop Art to the general public, featured Boshier alongside Blake, Boty, and Phillips.