Trivia

Attended the Royal College of Art.

Created the album art for David Bowie's The Lodger.

Classmates at the Royal College of Art included Peter Blake, David Hockney, Peter Phillips and Pauline Boty.

Taught at the Central School of Art and Design where one of his pupils was John Mellor, later known as Joe Strummer, of The Clash.

He worked in various media including painting, drawing, collage, and sculpture.

During the early 1970s Boshier taught at Central School of Art and Design where one of his pupils was John Mellor (later known as Joe Strummer of The Clash). This led to Boshier designing The Clash's second song book which included a collection of drawings and paintings released in conjunction with the album Give 'Em Enough Rope.

Derek Boshier was an English artist, among the first proponents of British pop art.

While still at the Royal College of Art Derek Boshier appeared with Peter Blake, Pauline Boty and Peter Phillips in Pop Goes the Easel (1962), a film by Ken Russell for the BBC's Monitor series. A pioneering program, Monitor's editors encouraged Russell to be ambitious and the resulting film can also be seen as a collaboration, taking inspiration from the formal aesthetics and themes within work of its artist-subjects.

After making a name for himself as one of Pop Art's elite, starting in the 1970s Boshier created work that broke out of the genre including progressively more graphic figurative paintings and hard-edged, non representational canvases on the border of Op Art.

Boshier designed David Bowie cover art for Lodger and Let's Dance.[12] For Lodger, Boshier also designed the inner gatefold which featured a college of images representing the themes of life and death. Boshier also designed stage sets for Bowie.

Boshier moved to Houston, Texas in the United States in 1980, after accepting a one-year visiting artist position at the University of Houston, and then joined the faculty there from 1981 to 1992. He moved back to England 1992 to 1997 and later joined the faculty of the California Institute of Arts in Los Angeles in 1997, where he'll lived until his death in 2024.

Boshier was commissioned by David Bowie, The Clash, and Pretty Things.

In the 1970s he shifted from painting to photography, film, video, assemblage, and installations, but he returned to painting by the end of the decade.

Derek Boshier attended Yeovil School of Art in Somerset, England from 1953-1957 (B.F.A.).

The boredom of the previous few years of National Service in the Royal Engineers had been alleviated by reading the works of Marshall McLuhan. During his college years, his work was didactic, commenting on the space race, the all-powerful multinationals and the increasing Americanisation of English culture.

He attended the Royal College of Art in London, 1959-1962 alongside David Hockney, Pauline Boty, Allen Jones and Peter Phillips, receiving his M.F.A. in 1962.

After graduating, he spent a year traveling in India on an Indian government scholarship.

His work uses popular culture and the mixing of high and low culture to confront government, revolution, sex, technology and war with subversive dark humor.

Boshier served as an instructor at the Central School of Art and Design, London from 1963 till 1979 and concurrently at the Royal College of Art London from 1973 to 1979.

Highly influenced by Samuel Beckett, Boshier said that the not knowing, the unknowability that ultimately make art compelling for him.