LONDON.- Delaye Saltoun will present Colin Self: Works from the 60s, on view 20 June - 1 August 2008. Extraordinarily, this will be the first London exhibition of Colin Self’s work from the 60s since his first solo show at the Piccadilly Gallery in 1965.

In recent years much has been made of Colin Self’s unique contribution to British Pop Art. He was the only British Pop artist to refer explicitly to the Cold War. Self's work depicts nuclear bombers, Hiroshima victims, guard dogs on missile bases and the famous ‘Nuclear Fallout Shelter’ series depicting sex shop mannequins. The most potent images of the period are pervaded by a paranoia, rooted in the artist’s fear of nuclear war. Self was born during World War Two near the American bases in Norfolk. Though he was never a political artist, the nuclear threat obsessed him to the point that he set out to make a visual record, for example in 1000 Temporary Objects Of Our Time, in the eventuality that all humanity would be destroyed.

Delaye Saltoun will exhibit drawings and sculpture exhibited at Self’s first solo show, which were also seen at the celebrated Robert Fraser Gallery in its 60s heyday. During this period, works by Self were acquired by David Hockney and the Rolling Stone Brian Jones, amongst others. Delaye Saltoun will also show a significant number of prints from the period, revealing Self as one of the most prolific and experimental printmakers of the decade. Self is a significant figure in British art history (at the last count, the Tate had acquired 76 works by him), but there have been almost no solo shows. Peter Blake has referred to Colin Self as a ‘forgotten hero’.

Sitting in a pub in 1962 as the Cuban Missile crisis reached its high point, Self was waiting for the world to end. When peace was declared, his ‘blocked psyche’ was released and Self was able to ‘pour out new radical, conservative, revolutionary post-atomic work, with possibilities, attitude and atmosphere’. Self’s drawings have been described as obsessive and neurotic: the artist himself says that his technique is ‘near to sarcasm … overloving to the point of being vulgar … like a still sexually receptive widow caring for her pet dog’.

This special exhibition has been curated by Mark Glazebrook, who, as art critic of The London Magazine in the mid 1960s, was one of the first to write about Self. (As director of the Whitechapel Art Gallery, Glazebrook later organized David Hockney’s first major retrospective exhibition.)

Delaye Saltoun is publishing the first catalogue to appear on the artist’s work of the 60s, a key period within his oeuvre. Simultaneously with this London exhibition, from June 21st the Self's first museum retrospective will be running at Pallant House Gallery, Chichester. Entitled Colin Self: Art In the Nuclear Age, it will show works from throughout the artist’s career.