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Image of Private View

Derek Boshier

British
(1937–2024)

Private View
1970

Gouache on magazine page on board
7.75 x 9 in. (19.685 x 22.86 cm)
Gift of the Kathryn C. Wanlass Foundation
2011.84.10

A contemporary of figures such as David Hockney and R. B. Kitaj, Derek Boshier graduated from the Royal College of Art in 1962. While Boshier’s mixed-media collages sit somewhere in the arena of pop art, they also move compellingly toward what Doug Harvey describes as “an unholy marriage between pop and hard-edge abstraction.” The series is made up of advertising images taken from magazines of the 1950s and 1960s, onto which Boshier has painted abstract sculptural objects. These objects are not merely imposed on the image surface but are placed within the world the advertising characters inhabit. Thus, the odd, discordant forms become a focus not only for the viewer but also for these characters. The objects are painted in uniformly consistent blues and grays.

In a work such as The Art Collector’s Home Movie, based on a full-color ad, the contrast is especially evident. However, in the monotone examples it is equally effective in emphasizing the juxtaposition of the clean lines of the photographic image and the disruptive sloppiness of the painted abstract objects. That sense of disruption encourages us to look anew at the world around us as well as at ourselves. We are seduced by advertising images of perfection and desire, and yet in Boshier’s worlds the central purpose of existence—the material object that we are being told to consume—has been replaced by an enigmatic, almost otherworldly, intrusion. As advertising images try to convince us that the world is simple and uncomplicated, Boshier steps in to remind us of its puzzling and abstract complexities.

David Wall

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