British Avant-Garde Film and Graphic Art

Stephen Dwoskin has hinted that producing the posters for films can be more expensive than making the films themselves. So he sometimes made them himself. His design for his own poster for Dynamo (1971) clearly illustrates his skills as an artist. The poster is part of the exhibition British Avant-Garde Film and Graphic Art. This exhibition evokes the context in which Dwoskin made his contribution to British avant-garde cinema as an influential film maker, writer and teacher. The posters all date from the period 1966 - 1985, as this is book-ended by the establishment of the London Film Makers Co-operative (LFMC) - a key moment of coherence and integration for the developing avant-garde - and the intervention in the late 1980s of the mainstream art establishment, and colonisation of gallery spaces that led to the explosion of interest in moving image art in the 1990s. The posters were produced before computer-based design programmes and digital imaging became common tools. For the most part, the designers had backgrounds in painting, printing, sculpture, photography and filmmaking, and very often used basic stencils, dyes, screen prints and paints, producing work that encompassed styles ranging from vivid psychedelia and pop art humour to situationist montage. The selection contains two categories: posters for seasons and films by individual artists and posters for key festivals and touring programmes.