John Dove and Molly White | Nov 17, 2020 - Ongoing

“Wonder Workshop T-Shirts distilled the flamboyance of the early 70’s. Artists John Dove and Molly White started the label in 1971. Lou Reed, Mick Jagger, Marc Bolan and Paul McCartney were photographed in state of the art shirts like “Pin-up Girls” and “My Baby Loves The Western Movies”. Their hand-printed designs had a major influence on T-Shirt graphics. Sophisticated prints were realised through a pioneering use of photographic screens and photo-montage techniques that produced “Lips” and “Leopardskin Girls” in 1973 while the “Exploding Mickey” T combined skilled draughtsmanship with explosive colours to evoke the

American Dream gone berserk.”

From ‘The T-Shirt Book’ by Alice Hiller and John Gordon, Ebury Press, London 1988

The montages stacked up through 1972 and 73 until a market could be found for the new prints. We would be working on an image for a straight 36 hours from start to finish. Translation of the image through half-tone colour separation gave the work the edge we 'd been looking for - an 'instant' processing where it could be quickly applied to screen and reworked on the print table. This deconstructed approach became the direction we would explore for the next decade. The 1973 Lips was one of the earlier Montage pieces but didn’t happen as a T-shirt until 1974 selling mostly through a few shops in Covent Garden and in Greenwich Village, New York. It marked the end of the Wonder Workshop Label’s Rock’N’Roll images and a new beginning for our print work. The Lips image, of course, is steeped in art history from the Dali image of Mae West, the Pop Art paintings of Tom Wesselmann and Andy Warhol to Joe Tilson’s Lips Clip-O-matic. In 1976, we dropped the yellow screen and remade screens to increase the red so the image was more stark - worked better with black. By 1977 the LIPS print became an important piece for us and formed a key part of the T-shirt collection produced over the following 20 years for Kitsch-22 and with BOY Blackmail.

it always made sense to do them as fine art prints

In 2010, the LIPS was included in a mixed show of photomontages and collages called 'THE TERM REALITY' at the The Paul Stolper Gallery. It was the first time LIPS had been available as a multiple artwork. In August 2011, The Lightbox Gallery held a stunning exhibition of British Pop Art from the 60’s curated by Michael Regan called “Snap, Crackle & Pop”. It included all the Pop Art greats from Clive Barker and Peter Blake to Joe Tilson and Colin Self. The LIPS montage series was exhibited at the entrance to the exhibition with prints from the Paul Stolper Gallery. In September 2012 LIPS was included in our exhibition FACE TO FACE at The Paul Stolper Gallery. The BLUE LIPS was also first produced in 1978 as a print on denim for Modzart printed jeans.