Boshier, Derek

Boshier, Derek (1937– ). British painter, sculptor, designer, and experimental artist, born in Portsmouth. He studied at Yeovil School of Art, 1953–7, Guildford College of Art, 1957–9, and the Royal College of Art, London, 1959–62. His contemporaries at the RCA included David Hockney, Allen Jones, R. B. Kitaj, and Peter Phillips, and like them Boshier is regarded as one of the leading British exponents of Pop art. His work of the early 1960s was much concerned with the manipulative forces of advertising, treating the human figure in the same way as mass-produced goods and blending them together. However, although Boshier's interest in advertising later resurfaced in his work, his involvement in Pop art was short-lived. In 1962 he spent a year in India, and this introduced Hindu symbolism into his work; soon afterwards he began producing Hard-Edge geometrical abstracts. In 1966 he abandoned painting for sculpture in perspex and neon, then turned to photography, film, and Conceptual art. He took up painting again in 1979 and in the following year moved to Houston, Texas, as assistant professor of painting at the university. He returned to Britain in 1993. Although his career has been fairly low-key compared with those of some of his Pop art colleagues from the early 1960s, many critics think that Boshier's work has stood the test of time at least as well as theirs; several reviewers of the ‘Pop Art’ exhibition at the Royal Academy in 1991 and the ‘Sixties’ exhibition at the Barbican Art Gallery in 1993 singled out his work for special praise.