Derek Boshier first met David Bowie in 1979. Shortly afterwards, Bowie asked Boshier to design the album artwork for Lodger. David Bowie first read Kerouac’s On the Road at the age of fifteen.
As a British Pop artist, Boshier has used popular culture, music and images throughout his work since the late 1960s, often dealing directly with a uniquely British view on American culture, politics, war and sex. Boshier’s second show at Night Gallery presents three recent paintings dedicated to the late Bowie, alongside other recent paintings and sculptures from the last decade. A selection of works on paper will bring a clear line around Boshier’s varied approaches to drawing and painting. Boshier’s techniques pre-date the tablet edges that feature in many of his paintings since the early 2010s; as he suggests, "today we see images with a black line around everything.”
Boshier began his career exhibiting in London in the 1960s after attending the Royal College of Art from 1959-1962, where he studied alongside fellow Pop artists David Hockney and RB Kitaj. Boshier was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship in 2017, and has shown extensively in the U.S. and Europe, including recent solo exhibitions at Night Gallery (Los Angeles), Tanya Leighton (Berlin), Tom Solomon Gallery (Los Angeles), and a two-person show at Galerie Albert Baronian (Brussels). Alongside his forthcoming exhibition at Night Gallery, he will have a solo exhibition at Gazelli Art House (London) in autumn 2017. His work has been included in recent group exhibitions at The Walker Art Center (Minneapolis), The Kunstmuseum Wolfsburg (Germany), and has been acquired by The Menil (Houston, TX), The Tate Gallery of British Art and The British Museum (London), The Brooklyn Museum (New York), and The Centre Pompidou (Paris), among other collections.