Lou Reed Rebel No. 7 T-Shirt

Rebel No. 7 in John Dove and Molly White's Rebel series, made for Kitsch-22, 22 Woodstock Street, London. The portrait is built from mass-media photographs of Reed, cut up and scanned onto film, then chopped and painted into the design over a solid black ground — the discharge-print effect for which the Rebel series is known, in which the figure appears to evolve from the cloth itself. Dove and White printed every Rebel T-shirt by hand on the studio's print-table: the cotton was pinned down and saturated with black first, the lighter areas then registered in colour after the black had dried. The artists briefly imported a carousel eight-colour Italian T-shirt machine, but the studio's dyes were too primitive for automation and the press was sold on; production reverted to the print-table and has remained there since. In 2007 the Aquarium Gallery, London commissioned Dove and White to publish the Rebel and Face collections from the original screens in a limited edition of forty-six numbered, signed examples, each accompanied by a certificate of authenticity and a photograph drawn from the artists' BOY Blackmail catalogue (1980) by Sheila Rock, Angelo Sotiriou, and Derek Hutchins.

An example of the design is held in the Damien Hirst Collection (Murderme), London.

LITERATURE:

Dove and White. BOY Blackmail. London: Flash Publishing, 1980

PROVENANCE:

From the personal archive of John Dove and Molly White