Nifo Derek Boshier

Boshier’s career began as the great promise of English Pop. He was a personality that evades definition, his unrestrained curiosity and restlessness driving him to ever newer experiments. While the others cashed in on the international career of Pop, Boshier soon abandoned the peculiar ironic painting with a political edge that had earned him a name.
In 1962, he went to India on scholarship, and back home a year later, he eliminated all figurative elements from his pictures, and started to use geometrical forms close to Op Art. Traces of this transformation can be detected in Nifo, a significant summary of Boshier’s attitude to painting. Following the example of Bridget Riley, Frank Stella and the American hard-edge painters in the mid-’60s, he made his pictures of a direct visual impact from geometrical colour streaks and clearly distinct forms giving at times a perspectivic illusion. The shaping of the stretcher and the outline of the canvas depart from the traditional rectangular format. Even without the figural elements, his pictures evoke architectonic structure and implicitly refer to the same visual elements of metropolitan life (traffic signs, pavement paintings, wall graffiti, advertising boards) as his former Pop Art pictures had done.
In the late ’60s, Boshier gave up painting and started to experiment with various media (photo, film, collage, book, poster, LP jacket), then having resettled in Texas, he just as unexpectedly returned to painting with his new figurative pictures.

Ferenc Tóth