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Joe Tilson

British artist Joseph Charles Tilson RA (b. London 24th August 1928), was heavily involved in the beginnings of Pop Art in the1950s and became one of the leading figures associated with the movement throughout the 60s. Making use of his earlier experience as a carpenter and joiner, Tilson produced wooden reliefs and constructions, as well as prints and paintings. Following his National Service, he went to St Martin's School of Art where he studied alongside Leon Kossoff, Frank Auerbach and Bernard Cohen, and became a member of the I.C.A. in Dover Street where he later met Richard Hamilton, Eduardo Paolozzi and Reyner Banham. In 1952 he went to the Royal College of Art with Peter Blake and Richard Smith. In 1955, after winning the Rome Prize, he went to live and work in Italy where he met, and later married, Joslyn Morton who was studying with Marino Marini at the Brera in Milan. After some months in Catalonia with Peter Blake they returned to London where Tilson met Kitaj, Hockney, Boshier, Phillips, Jones and Caulfield who were then students at the Royal College of Art.

He taught at St. Martin's School of Art from1958 to 1963, then at the Slade School of Art, University College, London; at King's College, Newcastle-upon-Tyne; at the School of Visual Arts, New York; and at the Hochschule für Bildende Künste, Hamburg.

He was widely exhibited internationally from 1958, with his first solo show at the Marlborough Gallery, London in 1962. In 1977 he joined the Waddington Galleries and also exhibited at the Alan Cristea Gallery and the Giò Marconi Galleries in Milan. Tilson's work gained an international reputation when shown at the XXXII Venice Biennale in 1964, the famous Pop Art Biennale that included Rauschenberg, Johns, Dine and Oldenburg, which then led to a retrospective at the Boyman's Museum, Rotterdam. Further retrospective exhibitions followed at the Vancouver Art Gallery in 1979 and the Arnolfini Gallery, Bristol in 1984. Growing disillusionment with the consumer society led to a change in Tilson work in the 1970s. After moving to Wiltshire in 1972, Tilson began to use a wider variety of materials, including stone, straw and rope in an effort to transcend time and culture by drawing on the motifs of pre-Classical mythology. This body of work was called Alchera.