Image: The Mayor Gallery, London
The Mayor Gallery in London is showing ‘Say it with Flowers, from The Odyssey/Iliad Suite’, a current Colin Self exhibition running from 20 to 31 July 2026. The presentation brings together four flower collagraphs from ‘The Odyssey/Iliad Suite’ alongside a selection of works from Self’s private collection. According to the gallery, the display is a celebration of Self’s 85th birthday and includes works for sale from the suite.
The four collagraphs on view are ‘Chinese Lanterns in a Two Tone Vase’, ‘Hands’, ‘Flowers in a Planished Vase, Blue Sky and Butterflies’ and ‘Chrysanthemums’, all dated 2009 and each measuring 100 x 70 cm. The Mayor Gallery describes the works as combining a poetic and personal touch, while the exhibition overview situates them within Self’s wider practice of collage, printmaking and related forms.
Self, born in 1941 in Rackheath, Norfolk, is presented by the gallery as one of the key figures of British Pop art. The gallery’s artist page notes that he studied at Norwich School of Art and then at the Slade in London in the early 1960s, where David Hockney and Peter Blake were among his contemporaries. It also stresses that his early work, made in the shadow of the Cold War, channelled political anxiety and nuclear paranoia, distinguishing him as the only British Pop artist to refer explicitly to the Cold War and its threat of annihilation.
The Mayor Gallery’s account of Self’s practice emphasises his use of paper collage and found material. Tickets, boxes, stamps and postcards are reassembled into images of everyday life and consumer culture, from hot dogs to comic-book scenes. The gallery says these works can combine humour with an undercurrent of violence and threat, and that Self intended them as a detailed record of his society, a form of historical archaeology that might preserve the essential qualities of the present for a future viewer.
Self returned permanently to Norwich in 1965, and the gallery says his subject matter and technical range have continued to expand over six decades to include Norfolk landscapes, still lifes and studies of human behaviour, alongside painting, drawing, printmaking, sculpture and ceramics. His work is held in collections including Tate, the British Council, Pallant House Gallery and Leeds Art Gallery.
The current show also arrives after a major year for Self’s profile. The Mayor Gallery notes that Norwich Castle Museum & Art Gallery staged ‘One Self: The Creative Life of Colin Self’ in 2025, described there as his largest and most comprehensive exhibition to date, bringing together more than 120 works. The gallery also cites his inclusion in ‘The World Goes Pop’ and ‘International Pop’ at Tate Modern, as well as the touring 2015–16 exhibition seen at the Walker Art Center, Dallas Museum of Art and Philadelphia Museum of Art. The London exhibition remains on view at The Mayor Gallery, 9 Bury Street, St James’s, until 31 July 2026.
