What to do Today: Swing by Lever Gallery’s 60s & 70s Exhibition

Stuck on what to do today? Let us help you. This Friday 23 February, we recommend heading to Lever Gallery’s first exhibition of 2018, celebrating art from the vibrant 60s and 70s…

If you often find yourself stuck for ideas of what to do, we’ve come to the rescue with our brand new ‘What To Do Today’ feature. We handpick the best of what’s on in London and the country right now, whether a new restaurant, must-see show, exhibition ending soon or a pop-up that you must, ahem, pop in to. Check back every day for inspiration…

Uncovered: Illustrating the Sixties & Seventies Exhibition

You may be surprised to hear that Pulp art is not, in fact, paintings of scenes from hit movie Pulp Fiction (as cool as that would be). Pulp actually refers to the cheap paper on which certain magazines were printed, publishing what was considered ‘low-quality’ literature – in contrast with the higher brow content of more expensive “glossy” magazines. Perhaps undeservedly, ‘pulps’ were best known for their lurid and sensational subject matter, used to denote both books and magazines.

‘Pulp is the art of the hired gun, a shot from the hip produced to order on a short deadline’

While much of the fiction is largely forgotten, Lever Gallery has chosen to focus its first exhibition of the year on the illustrations that fronted such mass-printed literature, providing a different angle of insight into the fascinating era.

READ MORE: The Best Current Exhibitions in London

Pulp art illustrations first gained popularity in the post-war 50s and continued to grow as colour printing processes became more affordable in the 60s – but there was a sharp turnaround with the advent of photography, which became the go-to choice for mass publishing.

However, Pulp’s more subtle visual language, as well as the artistic confidence and dazzling technical skills involved, appealed to a new generation of writers – and it’s a relatively unknown fact that Pulp art in fact helped shift the works of highbrow authors such as Simone de Beauvoir, Sinclair Lewis and CP Snow.

‘Uncovered: Illustrating the Sixties & Seventies’ features rare works by some of the most in-demand illustrators of the period, including Pino Dell’Orco, Renato Fratini, Gianluigi Coppola and Giorgio De Gaspari. These names may not mean much to you now – but they’ll stick in your mind once you see firsthand what they were able to produce. Such skill has become almost incomprehensible in our digital age.

‘The fiction that drove Pulp is largely forgotten, waiting undoubtedly for its own rediscovery. The Lever Gallery Uncovered exhibition reveals that it’s Pulp Art, with its offer of a wonderous escape into a gloriously inauthentic past, that is now the story.’

The exhibition opens today at Lever Gallery in Clerkenwell. Head on down to find yourself engrossed in an entirely new vision of the 60s and 70s.

READ MORE: The Events to Book for 2018

Where & When?

Lever Gallery, 153-157 Goswell Rd, Clerkenwell, London EC1V 7HD.

The exhibition opens today and will run until 24 March.

For more information, visit levergallery.com