One Self: The Creative Life of Colin Self

Born in 1941 in Norfolk, Colin Self first came to international prominence as a Pop artist in the 1960s. Since then, he has created an extensive body of work which includes painting, drawing, printmaking, collage, sculpture and ceramics.

The first major retrospective of his work in 17 years, One Self: The Creative Life of Colin Self, contains over 100 works of art from Tate, Norfolk Museums Service, Pallant House Gallery, Leeds Art Gallery and private collections, dating from Self’s time as a student at the Slade School of Fine Art in the early 1960s, to the present day.

The exhibition explores the artist’s significant contribution to twentieth-century art, complex relationship with the London art scene and deliberate positioning on the margins of the art world, including periods of self-imposed exile and solitude. In an age in which ideas of the local, over and above the global, are increasingly centre stage in the context of the environmental crisis, Self’s work has a new resonance, which demands critical reappraisal.