Garth Greenan Gallery is pleased to announce the gallery’s ninth online viewing room, Derek Boshier: Drawn from Life. Opening March 14, 2024, this online exhibition highlights Boshier's drawings from the early 1960s to the present. Accompanied by a collection paintings and one woolen tapestry, these works shed light on the material care present throughout his storied career. 

As a complement to the following depictions of flight, time, violence and sports, we present an essay written for the occassion by writer and curator Gilles Heno-Coe: 

Derek Boshier could be considered an ironic case study in medium un-specificity and offers a kaleidoscopic vision unified by his strange and “popularist” sensibility (to use a term favored by the artist). Whether in graphite or paint, print or book, film or photography, Boshier’s imagery and themes have common sources: the mass media, including magazines, westerns, news reels, television, iPhone images, even art history itself. A palpable sense of place also permeates his work—with cities like London, Houston, and Los Angeles featuring as regular backdrops for his iconic falling figures and hollow, gaping profiles, emptied out and dehumanized by craven, American-style consumerism.

Possessing a pragmatic and working-class notion that the medium should suit art's purpose and feeling that painting failed to realize the totality of his vision, Boshier would, in the late-1960s, abandon the medium for thirteen years. He remained just as prolific, especially in drawing, while experimenting with other media including, more recently, woolen tapestry.

Following a move to the United States in 1980, and missing the characteristic physicality of the medium, Boshier finally resumed painting, producing a series of iconic, humorous portrayals of the Postmodern American West. No matter the medium, according to Robert Moeller, “what Boshier offers is a serious critique — visual reminders, if you will — of the absurdities of modern life.”

More recently, the falling figure has taken the form of a woman, such as in Boshier’s drawing Falling Figure #1 (2018). The gaping profile returns here as well, appearing as a silhouette through which a Western cityscape disappears along a twilight horizon, its eye cleverly doubling as a crescent moon. The face crumbles along its right side like lego bricks tumbling into the sheet’s white void, while it splinters off to infinity along its left. Positive space becomes negative and vice versa, demonstrating Boshier’s unique facility for this inherently flat, linear medium which somehow seems to pop right off the page at the same time.

In another recent drawing, Archie and Picasso (2018), Boshier’s familiar hollow face is stuffed with characters from the popular American comic strip as well as the haunting visage of the famed Modernist painter. The alternately anxious and anticipatory faces of the cartoons stand in stark contrast to the grim and portentous grimace of Picasso, a sketch that references one of the artist’s well-known, late self-portraits. Lines radiate out from the profiled face in energetic squiggles, animating with intensity as it appears about to crack open, spilling its pressurized contents into the abyss.

In his drawings in particular, Boshier abhors a vacuum, preferring to fill the composition with dense, fragmenting lines and figures, which are fractured like puzzle pieces amidst geometric voids, sometimes opening into spaces beyond themselves, like in drawings such as Tales from the Crypt Magazine (2018) and World Series (2020).

Like Archie and Picasso (2018), Tales from the Crypt Magazine (2018) also references a classic Post-War comic, the bi-monthly, twenty-seven issue series which ran from 1950 to 1955. These mid-century vignettes are rendered as simple line drawings against white backgrounds, which pop out like jagged pieces whose frenetic edges fail to perfectly line up with one another.

World Series (2020) mimics the prior drawing’s compositional strategies, yet features a crosshatched background reminiscent of a 1970s Jasper Johns painting. Assorted vignettes seem to tumble across this crisscrossed background—their physicality artificially enhanced by irrational yet effective shading. The varied scenes ranges from images of Auschwitz to turbaned horse riders, ladybugs on leaflets, beetles, and even the gas giant Saturn, all of which appear as if torn from popular science or travel magazines.

In the wake of his success with Bowie, and the songbooks he did for The Clash the same year, a visiting lecture in Houston in 1980 would turn into an unexpected decades-long stay in the United States—thirteen in Texas alone. The same year marked his return to painting. Having begun to appreciate the historical painting he saw in museums, together with his desire to recapture the inherent physicality of the medium, Boshier created a series of ironic larger-than-life cowboys, prancing naked amid desert cityscapes.

Between Sunset and Sunrise - Houston (1980) is a classic painting from this period. Depicting the skyline of Houston, it is either at sunrise or sunset, it is unclear from the picture, although this fact is cheekily referenced in the painting’s title. The surface is lusciously tactile, and what appear to be three floating mirages dance in front of the city’s looming skyline, containing within them caricatures of cowboy hats and boots, absent any wearers. The Houston skyline is later prominently featured as a backdrop in the album cover for Bowie’s Let’s Dance (1983), showing the musician inboxing gloves illuminated by a projection of a Derek Boshier work. Between Sunset and Sunrise - Houston (1980), like many others from the period, reflects, in the words of Marco Livingstone, the artist’s “raucous humor and pointed satire, agitated surfaces and sometimes irresistibly vulgar texan imagery.”

Themes of the American West continue to fascinate Boshier, and frequently appear in his paintings and drawings. Winchester 73 (2020) is a recent example, featuring a cowboy with a rifle, presumably a coin in his other hand, which appears disembodied from the main figure to the right. He looms over the porch of a hotel and saloon centered at the horizon, amidst a hail of wristwatches. Time is money, apparently, and this fellow seems eager to spend it as quickly as possible.

Layered compositions, like this one, as critic John Yau has noted, reference the technique of collage with which Boshier became so familiar in his years not painting. The entire composition quivers, all the forms possessing the same energetic, tightly-packed line quality, whether the background of sky and clouds, the woodgrain of the saloon, the stitching of the cowboy’s frilled sleeve, or the bands of the wristwatches, each frozen in a frenzied spinning around its axis.

Time, its passage, or lack thereof is referenced again in three large 24 1/2 x 32 inch graphite drawings including Alchemy, Alchemy (2018), The Miracle (2020), and Vladimir and Estragon: Time Spent (2020). The latter references the main characters from Waiting for Godot, a Modernist play by the Irish playwright Samuel Beckett. This absurdist sense of humor is also reflected in his painting, Alfred Jarry, featuring scenes from the titular character’s life and works, rendered in shades of blue.

This homage to the inventor of “pataphysics” (along with his earlier invocation of Picasso) certainly situates Boshier within the legacy of the historical avant-garde, both in terms of formal as well as conceptual influence.

In the past few years, Boshier has produced large-scale compositions in wool, as if rendering drawings on a large scale, in a new, overtly tactile medium. This draws his tight and energetic compositions from the paper page into a more corporeal realm, threaded strands replacing graphite squiggles. In monumental works like Ghost of a Flea, 2021, Boshier once again invokes the work of Romantic English poet, painter, and printmaker William Blake, whose two-hundred year old miniature painting of the same name serves as the tapestry’s direct inspiration.

The muscular and nude Flea is depicted with a jutting tongue which gorges on a bowl of blood, stars streaking past. Part human, part vampire, and part reptile, the beast strides from right to left between heavy and richly patterned curtains, which Boshier has rendered in his version as flowing leaves. In his left hand he holds an acorn and in his right a thorn, both items drawn from the tradition of fairy iconography. His massive neck is similar to a bull’s, and he has a disproportionally small head, marked by glaring eyes, open jaws, and a slithering tongue. According to the art critic Jonathan Jones, the flea is depicted as an "evil, gothic, grotesque stalking through a starry realm between stage curtains.” Despite being a small painting, Blake’s metaphysical portrait possesses a monumental air, which is captured in Boshier’s appropriately large, woolen homage.

Garth Greenan Gallery is pleased to represent Derek Boshier.

Derek Boshier: Some Landscapes will be available to view online through April 12, 2024. For more information, please contact Garth Greenan Gallery at (212) 929-1351, or email info@garthgreenan.com.