Joe Tilson

Joe Tilson was born in 1928 in London. He began working as a carpenter and then he enlisted in the military from 1944 to 1946. After the war, he attended art school beginning his artistic career, marked right from the start by his encounters with Hamilton and Paolozzi. In 1952 he moved to Rome for a scholarship and traveled around Italy (first Sicily and then Venice) together with his future wife Joslyn Morton. He returned to London and devoted himself to teaching until 1963, and after that he taught in New York and Hamburg.

His first international exhibitions in Paris, Germany, Tokyo, South America, USA, Italy, Sweden, began in 1958. In the 1960s he established himself as one of the major representatives of the new wave of English Pop Art, together with Auerbach, Kitaj, Blake , Jones and Hockney. In 1962 his first solo exhibition and artistic consecration was at the XXXII Biennale of Art in Venice, in 1964, where he exhibited with Rauschenberg, Dine, Oldenburg.

Tilson’s Pop Art period ended in 1970 with Pages, a series of political works, in the middle of sixty-eight fervor. Ever more conflicting with a custom society, with the idea of industrial progress and western civilization, Tilson in the early seventies changed his artistic path. He abandoned his previous poetics for a cycle entitled Alchera. The new works were inspired by Pound, Joyce, Yates and their interest in Mediterranean traditions and neoPlatonism. Alchera looked like a circular mnemonic device related to the four cardinal points, the four natural elements and the four seasons. In this period the artist left the urban dimension: he moved with his family to the Wiltshire countryside and took an old farm near Cortona, in the Tuscan region.

In the seventies and eighties he continued to exhibit all over the world, and in 1985 he was elected a member of the Royal Academy of Arts in London. He is now represented by the Marlborough and Alan Cristea Gallery in London.

Thanks to the Bugno Art Gallery, he has also introduced the processing of Murano glass in his artistic project. In 2011 he received the Do Forni International Award at the Ca ‘Pesaro Museum of Modern Art in Venice. In his long career, Joe Tilson has experimented with different materials (including paints, wood, plexiglass) and disparate techniques, ranging from collage to photomontage and engraving, inspired by ancient cultures, like for instance children’s interlocking games. His mastery makes him a continuous experimenter, in balance between the recovery of childhood purity and the incisiveness in the social context in which he operates.

Lives and works in London, Cortona and Venice.

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