LONDON.- Drawn from archival photographs and drawings, this group of works includes several from Derek Boshier's Routes series, charting the artist’s time in rural Wales, a country to which he had a deep personal connection to. In the 1970s, Boshier began experimenting with film and photography, producing series that traced journeys through sequences of captured ‘stills’. The works will now be housed in the permanent collection of Amgueddfa Cymru – Museum Wales.
'In 1973 Boshier's first retrospective at London's Whitechapel Art Gallery showcased the artist's growing concern with the way the scale and significance of an object could be changed by placing it in different contexts... Concerned with what the artist described as 'change of pace, face, alteration, variation, transformation, modulation, permutation, shift, merging and difference', a series of documentary and abstracted images were laid out sequentially, each tableau morphing into the next in a process that aimed to slow down the experience of viewing a film to a pace dictated solely by the viewer. Boshier's drawings of this period also formed the basis of three short films that use collage techniques and combine drawing, photography and moving image to contrast layers of imagery and critique, capturing his fascination with the duality of images. ' – Derek Boshier: Reinventor. Edited by Helen Little, (extract).
These works have been acquired with the generous support of the Derek Williams Trust and Art Fund.
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” - Derek Boshier
Derek Boshier (1937–2024) was an English artist born in Portsmouth who lived in Texas (1980–93) before settling in Los Angeles in 1997. He held four solo exhibitions at Gazelli Art House, including Reinventor (2023); a posthumous show, The Way Forward: Derek Boshier and the Sixties, followed in 2025.
Known for witty, personal reflections on popular culture and sharp social commentary, Boshier rose to prominence at the Royal College of Art in the early 1960s alongside David Hockney, Allen Jones and R.B. Kitaj. He appeared in Ken Russell’s 1962 film Pop Goes the Easel and in the landmark Young Contemporaries exhibition at the R.B.A. Galleries the same year.
After a travel grant to India, he developed shaped, brightly coloured canvases combining Pop and hard-edge abstraction, shown in New Generation (Whitechapel Gallery, 1964). From the 1970s he expanded into photography, film, video and installation, while continuing to paint and draw. Music was central to his practice: he designed David Bowie’s 1979 album Lodger and collaborated with Joe Strummer from The Clash, and who was also a former student. An accomplished and influential teacher, Boshier inspired generations of artists.
Boshier’s work is in public collections internationally, including: Tate, London; The Victoria and Albert Museum, London; MoMA New York, USA; Gulbenkian Foundation, Lisbon, Portugal; Yale Center for British Art, Connecticut, USA; National Gallery of Scotland, Edinburgh; National Portrait Gallery, London; Government Art Collection, UK; British Council Collection; Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, TX, USA; National Gallery of Poland, Warsaw, Poland. He was awarded an Honorary Fellowship from the Royal College of Art (2016), and a Guggenheim Fellowship (2017) and an Honorary Doctorate of the Arts, from Solent University (2021), Southampton, UK.
