Garth Greenan Gallery was pleased to host a Zoom webinar and Q&A on May 14, 2021, featuring gallery artist Derek Boshier and filmmaker James Scott, moderated by the gallery’s assistant director and archivist Rachel Garbade. For the first time since its 2020 debut at the International Film Festival Rotterdam, Scott’s 45-minute documentary Fragments (2019), profiling Boshier and his artistic production, was made available for public view.
As with many of Scott’s films, this documentary explores the nature of the creative process by unobtrusively witnessing the journey from Boshier’s first pencil and brush marks to the finished works World News and Night and Snow. Both Scott and Boshier have spent their careers alternating between painting and filmmaking. In Fragments, the sensitive interaction of the two artistic media, including numerous filmic interludes by Boshier himself, creates a rare level of intimacy.
Born 1937 in Portsmouth, UK, Boshier currently lives and works in Los Angeles. The artist first rose to prominence while still a student at the Royal College of Art, through the landmark 1961 exhibition Young Contemporaries alongside classmates David Hockney, Allen Jones, R.B. Kitaj, Pauline Boty, and Peter Phillips. Mass audiences were first exposed to his work via The Clash’s 2nd Songbook, as well as David Bowie’s Lodger album cover. He has been both prolific and wide-ranging in his artistic production, working in such varied media as painting, drawing, prints, film, sculpture, and installation, among others. His first exhibition with Garth Greenan Gallery, Derek Boshier: Alchemy Alchemy, is currently on view until May 22, 2021.
Like Boshier, Scott was born in England, and now lives and works in Los Angeles. Through the ’60s, the painter and filmmaker gained prominence, not only through his inclusion in Young Contemporaries, but also through his pioneering art films, made in collaboration with artists such as Claes Oldenburg and Richard Hamilton, as well as Boshier’s former classmates Hockney and Kitaj. In the following decades, Scott created a number of political documentaries and other narrative films—including his Oscar winning Graham Greene short, A Shocking Accident (1993)—before moving to Los Angeles, where he shifted his focus to painting. Fragments marks a return to his artist films.
To view the event recording, please click here. To watch Fragments (2019), directed by James Scott, please click here.