Dallas Art Fair: Booth A5

The variegated practice of Los Angeles-based, English artist Derek Boshier is coined by astute and wry observations of popular culture. Among the first exponents of British Pop Art, what distinguished Boshier from contemporaries — including Peter Blake, Patrick Caulfield, and Pauline Boty — was his trademark brand of satirical social commentary.

Together with fellow RCA students David Hockney, Allen Jones, Peter Philips, and R. B. Kitaj, he participated in the landmark 1962 Young Contemporaries exhibition that brought Pop Art to the attention of the wider public. Boshier worked in a variety of media, including painting, drawing, collage, and sculpture. In the 1970s, he expanded from painting to photography, film, video, assemblage, and installations, yet he returned to painting by the end of the decade. On what shapes his work, Boshier commented: “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”.

Boshier’s work has appeared in many museum exhibitions, including: the Walker Art Center, Minneapolis; Tate Britain and British Museum, London; Brooklyn Museum, New York; Centre Pompidou, Paris. In 2016 Boshier was the recipient of the Honorary Fellowship of the RCA as well as receiving the Guggenheim fellowship and NEA award for the arts. Notably too, he was an accomplished teacher and lecturer.

Sir Frank Bowling RA moved to London in 1953, where his career began shortly after his arrival at the Royal College of Art (1959-62). Initially working as a figurative painter, Bowling's subject matter was both personal and political. Relocating to New york in 1966, Bowling made a considered turn towards abstraction. During this time he developed a process-based practice; exploring the nature and possibilities of paint with his monumental colour field paintings he cemented his importance the New York art scene. In the following years, his work became increasingly geometrically complex. Guided by principals of mathematics and symmetry, in the early 1980s, geometric ideas came to influence, not just his subject matter, but the way he physically worked with the canvas. Using Styrofoam his canvasses became progressively sculptural, an aesthetic that characterises Bowling's current output. His recent work continues to investigate the formal and emotional qualities of abstract painting. A much-loved contemporary British painter, Bowling's work has been exhibited internationally, including at the Tate Britain, London; the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, San Francisco; the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; the Haus der Kunst, Munich; and the Arnolfini Gallery, Bristol.

Harold Cohen was a British artist whose innovations at the forefront of technology changed the face of computer art. Working at the intersection of art and artificial intelligence since the late 1960s, Harold Cohen was the creator of AARON, one of the earliest AI computer programs designed to produce paintings and drawings autonomously. His work was exhibited extensively throughout his life at major institutions including Tate London, Institute of Contemporary Arts, Whitechapel Gallery, LACMA and SFMOMA. 

Having graduated from Slade School of Fine Art, Cohen’s first solo exhibition was held at Ashmolean Museum, Oxford in 1951 and by the mid-1960s he was recognized as one of Britain’s best regarded painters. In 1966, he was selected to represent Great Britain at the Venice Biennale. Two years later at the height of his career as a painter, he decided to relocate to the United States as a visiting lecturer at the University of California in San Diego. He learned the programming language FORTRAN and in 1971 was invited to spend two years at the Stanford University’s Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (SAIL) where he developed his ideas about machine-generated art which would eventually lead to the development of AARON, the AA drawing program that he continued to work on for the rest of his life.

The first major exhibition of his early work with computer-generated art was at LACMA in 1972 and throughout that decade his work was exhibited at Documenta 6 in Kassel, the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam and San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. He continued his work at UC San Diego as professor, Chairman of the Visual Arts Department and eventually in 1992, Director of the Centre for Research in Computing and the Arts. 

Following his retirement in 1994 from the university, he continued to work on AARON and produce new artwork in his studio in Encinitas, California. In 2014, Cohen received the ACM SIGGRAPH Distinguished Artist Award for Lifetime Achievement in Digital Art. Harold Cohen regarded artificial intelligence as a tool to better understand his own ways of perception and meaning and his work with algorithms and plotters inspired multiple generations of artists who use code in their practice.

Lilly Fenichel was born in Vienna, Austria, to a Jewish family. She fled the Nazi invasion in 1939 and eventually settled in Hollywood, where she studied at the Chouinard Art Institute and the California School of Fine Arts under Hassel Smith, Edward Corbett, David Park and Elmer Bischoff. In 1952, Fenichel moved to New York, shared a studio with Harland Jackson and taught art classes at the Museum of Modern Art. Her contemporaries included Mark Rothko, Jackson Pollock, and Franz Kline.

She returned to California and spent many years in Los Angeles, notably showing at the Santa Barbara Museum of Art in 1968. Following a move to New Mexico, she became a member of the Taos Moderns. She was the recipient of three Pollock Krasner grants. 

Fenichel had exhibitions and is in the permanent collection of major museums including LACMA, the Crocker Museum, the Denver Art Museum, the Santa Barbara Museum of Art and the Albuquerque Museum of Art. Fenichel’s work was recently featured in Action, Gesture, Paint: Women Artists and Global Abstraction 1940-70 at the Whitechapel Gallery in London.