Too Hot to Handle T-shirt

A 2009 hand-pulled reissue of John Dove and Molly White's Too Hot to Handle design. Originally produced at the end of the artists' Rebel T-shirt session of 1979 and then rereleased in the 1980s as part of a wider run of eight photomontage prints, this 2009 reissue was hand-printed by Dove and White from the original 1970s screens.

The composition layers a red pin-up figure against a vertical missile, beneath the title set in cut-out ransom-note typography across the left of the chest in red, black and yellow, with greenish-yellow ground washes pulled across the surface — sex bomb and atomic bomb collapsed into a single image in the Cold War nuclear-age visual register that ran across British political T-shirt design in the late 1970s. At the studio's print table the makers deliberately kept the number of screens to a minimum, using them as if they were paintbrushes — changing color and shape at random across the surface so that no two pulls came out identical. The design belongs to the wider body of work — Rebel, Face, and the associated photomontage series — that placed Dove and White at the centre of British political and pop-graphic T-shirt practice across the late Seventies into the 1980s.

28 3/4 × 16 9/16 inches (73 × 42 cm)