'Learn from the Past' (Red)

JAMIE REID (1947–2023)

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

signed 'Jamie Reid' (lower edge)

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.

The companion red colourway to lot 56. One of Jamie Reid's most enduring slogans — Learn from the Past, Live in the Present, Look to the Future — a phrase that condenses Reid's life's work, from his early-1970s agitprop at Suburban Press in Croydon, through his role as the visual architect of the Sex Pistols campaigns of 1976–79, into the late painting and printmaking he produced in the years before his death in 2023.

Black and red stage the same composition in the paired chromatic system Reid had used since the Pistols-era prints — colour as ideological register, the two together as a political pairing.