'Learn from the Past' (Black)

JAMIE REID (1947–2023)

Learn from the Past, Live in the Present, Look to the Future (Black)

signed 'Jamie Reid' (lower right)

inkjet base print on 310gsm Hahnemühle 'German Etching' paper, with acrylic screen-print additions and mixed media on board

43 7/8 x 32 1/4 x 3/4 inches (111.5 x 82 x 2 cm)

Executed in 2011.

Jamie Reid — the artist whose ransom-note typography, Pop-art collage and Situationist détournement defined the visual identity of the Sex Pistols and have remained continuously in print, reproduction and homage in the half-century since. Reid's slogan Learn from the Past, Live in the Present, Look to the Future recurs across his entire post-Pistols practice, condensing the political and spiritual continuities that run from his early-1970s agitprop at Suburban Press in Croydon, through his work with Malcolm McLaren on the Sex Pistols campaigns of 1976–79, into the late painting and printmaking Reid produced in the years before his death in 2023.

The present work is the black colourway in the paired chromatic system Reid had used throughout his career, since the Sex Pistols-era prints — black and red as opposed political registers. The companion red (lot 57) is offered following.