Gerald Laing b. 1936

The present work is listed as no.32 in the catalogue of the artist’s works.

Laing is unusual amongst British pop artists in that having moved to New York in 1964, almost all his pop work was produced in an American rather than British context. His initial imagery, which drew on newspaper representation of movie stars, developed into work based around the issues of perception of glamour in roles such as drag racers, astronauts and skydivers. The images are highly stylized and provide an interesting complement to the contemporary work of Peter Phillips with whom Laing collaborated on Hybrid, a project where the resultant work was dictated by the demands of consumers.

The shaped multi-part canvases (similar to the contemporary experiments of Hockney and Jones) allowed for divisions of the imagery and here we see the duplicated NASA astronaut given a sense of speed by the stylized flames more commonly seen on drag-racers and custom cars.