"Pioneering British pop artist and David Bowie collaborator Derek Boshier explores the Icarus myth and the Hallyu wave at Gazelli Art House, London.
The year is 1962 and this is the Portsmouth-born artist Derek Boshier talking to the soon to be notorious film director Ken Russell. Boshier was one of four young artists then profiled in Russell’s pioneering BBC production Pop Goes the Easel, the others being Pauline Boty, Peter Phillips, and the pre-Sgt. Pepper Peter Blake. All were already viewed at the time as exemplars of British Pop Art, a new wave following on from the innovations of Richard Hamilton and Eduardo Paolozzi in the 1950s.
Boshier’s righteous agitation back in ’62 was about The Bomb. Of course the threat of nuclear war remains a live issue but, as per contemporary fears on display at the COP26 conference, our planet is now in even deeper trouble. And sixty years on from that conversation Boshier, now aged eighty-four, shows no sign on this current showing that he’s lost any of his political angst."
