Poster Pop: Rupert Goldsworthy

Painter, academic, curator, gallerist and author Rupert Goldsworthy gets most enthused by signage, the cult of charisma and the melding-and clashing-of cultures in urban space. Taking the iconography of radical histories as his starting point for many of his large, poster-style paintings, the English-born artist brings together faintly familiar figures of old that were used as tools for propaganda, with his own text, rococo patterning, Ben-day-like dots and copied signs from Islamic food shops in Berlin, military graves and mass media. The juxtaposition feels far from a mere mishmash of appropriated imagery; it's the tracking of the history of images that is central to the work. Goldsworthy has previously run eponymous gallery spaces in Berlin and New York. His recent solo show, "New Paintings" at Ritter/Zamet Gallery in Whitechapel, East London, explored the continuity and contraditions of an aspiring post-racial Berlin today.


LAURA K JONES: Your large-scale paintings here are all on brown wrapping paper. Why not canvas?

RUPERT GOLDSWORTHY: I like the tactile quality of wrapping paper, and its ruggedness. I like the excessiveness of the size. A work at this scale on paper feels relaxed and intimate in a way that canvas doesn't. I wanted the works to live and breathe on their own terms, to feel expansive, not cramped.
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