in ‘Colin Self: Unseen’ at Frith Street Gallery to 7 November, 2026
Upstairs, in 85 year old Colin Self’s first London retrospective since 1986, is an extensive survey of old and not-so-old works from the 85 year old’s long career since he became known as the pop artist who addressed the nuclear threat in the sixties. As the show’s curator, Ian Collins, puts it, Self ‘retains a sense of living on the edge – between city and countryside, land and sea, nature reserves and rubbish dumps, peace and war, past and present, truth and myth’. That’s all as relevant as ever, and his pop-tinged language, resisting conventional hierarchies of images, remains fresh. As Tacita Dean says in her accompanying essay: ‘For him, the image on a biscuit packet has equal potency to the image of the Mona Lisa… What is truly radical about him as an artist is his desire to be valued more within the canon of the vernacular than within the canon of art history.’
‘Unseen’ is a timely – if unsurprising – demonstration of why Self is an important artist, for all that he has sat outside the commercial mainstream. Downstairs, though, we get the surprise. A mammoth new work – you could call it 365 works, as it is made up by enough 20 x 20 cm canvases to provide one for every day of a year.
‘365: A journey in that direction’ bubbles over with variety and wit as it celebrates art and the vernacular. Along with straight painting and secondary images and packaging, there is frequent use of unorthodox collage materials: lots of shells and bottle tops, a bath plug, denim jeans and ceramic birds… The eclectic subjects include nature from Self’s Norfolk surroundings; spider web paintings; plays on alternative tropes of abstraction; personal photographic memories set in Mondrian grids; a face made of liquorice allsorts; a sign directing us to a fallout shelter; white poppies proclaiming a message of peace; Jesus held aloft by elephants; a diagram purporting to set out the relationship between truth, health and freedom; a scarf waved across seven canvases; and a line of ten spelling out the suggestion that we live in a ‘Shamocracy’. With his virtuoso use of anything he finds, says Dean, Self emerges as a master illusionist, ‘while at the same time showing us exactly how he is making it. The illusion embodies its own artifice’ and incorporates ‘the magpie joy of finding things, and the pleasure in making things out of things’. There’s also a gentle defiance in what the gallery sees as ‘humane optimism in the face of oblivion’.
Paul Carey-Kent selects a ‘Gallery of the Month’, a ‘Show of the Month’, a ‘Work of the Month’ and a ‘Book of the Month’ for his weekly column in FAD. A collection of previous gallery columns ‘Paul’s Galleries To Go’, is available from FAD.
