LONDON.- Shapero Modern is staging an exhibition by London and Sussex-based 3D-artist Jack Milroy from the 15th April to the 17th May 2026. This is the first time Jack has exhibited at Shapero on New Bond Street, and he has chosen works created from books, appropriately naming the exhibition Bibliophilia. This follows on the heels of his show Post Card Post Book at Benjamin Rhodes Gallery, London in 2025.

Glasgow-born Milroy can look back on a long, successful career, with 30 solo exhibitions in London and the US, that saw him start his art education in his adopted home county of Yorkshire (Scarborough School of Art 1956 to 1960) and continued at London University before teaching at West Surrey College of Art and Design in Farnham. His work can be found in the V&A, Imperial War Museum, the British Library and a number of hospitals, including Great Ormond Street, the UK Government Art Collection, the Kit Kemp collection and the Caldic Collection in the Netherlands. His works can also be found in private and corporate collections in the UK and abroad, including BA, De Beers, Fidelity, Seagrams, Bank of America, Nat West, Firmdale Hotels, University of Wisconsin, Queen Mary University, London and others.

Career highlights include his newspaper and stamp collages (1975 - 79), his work inspired by the Ingres' painting of Comtesse d'Haussonville (1980) and his cut-outs made using books as the material and collaborations with the novelist, the late Dame Antonia Byatt.

For this exhibition, Jack has carefully selected books whose far rarer predecessors can be found at Shapero Rare Books. Books depicting flowers, animals and costumes. One exception from using books for his cut outs are his now famous sardine piccanti tins. For his early work in that medium, he ate sardines every day for lunch!

Jack reflects on his forthcoming exhibition: “Upstairs at Shapero Rare Books, you will be able to see the display of first editions and beautifully illustrated folio editions, carefully presented in pristine condition. These books can be read but they are also meant for collecting and display. Downstairs in the Shapero Modern Gallery, my exhibition shows books vandalised, disembowelled and dismembered, presented in crisp acrylic showcases. These books are not meant to be read but for collecting, reflecting perhaps on the demise of the book as a purveyor of information and knowledge”.

Although the artist is clearly a fan of colour, Jack stopped painting relatively early on in his career. Instead, he started experimenting with collages and cut-outs almost 60 years ago. His work has been described by Andrew Lambirth as planar collage, and has been greatly inspired by the Surrealists, Picasso and Max Ernst.

He started collecting books,with suitable illustrations, in a market near his house in France, initially, without any idea what he was going to do with them, but intuition telling him they would be important.

He confesses that he doesn't always start each work with a concept, but often will take instructions from the title of the book. As an example, in the 70’s, he was given a book by a friend, titled ‘Manual of Operative Surgery, subsequently operating on the book itself with a surgeon's scalpel, releasing the images which were suspended umbilically from the book, and in a beautiful circularity bought by a surgeon! Another work was made from a number of books, titled ‘Matisse Cut Outs,' diligently following the instructions in the title. Most of his works are presented in individual perspex cases.

Whilst some of his past oeuvre has strong political undertones, like for example following the attack on the World Trade Towers, his current work returns to a more joyful look at first sight, but closer inspection will draw the viewer into the work in question and lead to discovering the poetry in the image.

As Jackie Wullschlager wrote in her “Critic’s Choice” article for the FT Weekend March 2015 “the precise intricacy, stealthy elegance and visual wit ... carved into dynamic life by his scalpel, his animals and plants leap, fly, float, swing across his glass cabinets and light boxes subverting their encyclopaedic sources to propose questions about the nature of representation, perception and geopolitical reality.”