Collection: Joe Tilson
Joe Tilson (born 1928, London) trained at St Martin's and the Royal College of Art before spending formative years in Italy and Spain. He emerged as a central figure in British Pop Art in the early 1960s, producing screenprints, reliefs and multiples that drew on mass communication, signage, popular imagery and the visual language of information systems. His work from this period — ladders, peepholes, coded messages, stencilled letters — is simultaneously playful and structurally rigorous.
By the early 1970s, Tilson had moved decisively away from Pop toward myth, landscape and ecology, developing a sustained engagement with ancient Mediterranean cultures that would occupy him for decades. He is a Royal Academician and his work is held in major public collections internationally.
The printed matter gathered here documents a practice that moved through several distinct phases without losing its underlying commitment to the handmade, the symbolic and the politically engaged.
