As it was for so many of the pop artists, printmaking – specifically, screen-printing – was an integral part of Gerald Laing’s extensive working practice. The commercial nature of the process and the bold, flat colours it produced were sympathetic both to the conceptual and stylistic character of pop art. Elevated from a functional practice to a fine-art medium, screen-printing became an important technique for Laing and his contemporaries in pop art – a movement which defined a generation and still influences artists today.

Laing’s first print, Gold Spin (Pile), was executed in 1965, with the now-legendary Tamarind Lithography Workshop in Los Angeles. The following year, in 1966, he was asked to include three works in 11 Pop Artist Portfolios. Commissioned by Philip Morris and intended to be an overview of the emerging pop art movement, these portfolios included contributions from eleven of the most important pop artists of the time, including the celebrated North Americans Andy Warhol, Roy Lichtenstein, Tom Wesselmann and James Rosenquist. Allen Jones was the only other British artist in the group. Laing’s inclusion in this seminal portfolio reflects his place, at the crux of the movement, as one of the pioneers of pop. During the summer of 1967, Laing embarked on three monumental printing projects: Dragsters, Parachutes, and the portfolio Baby Baby Wild Things. Using a home-made press and a vacuum table assembled using parts from his domestic hoover, he printed and editioned the prints himself in his loft on the Bowery in New York City. The prints from this year depict what have come to be known as his seminal subjects – pin-up girls in bikinis, hot rods and skydivers, as well as Brigitte Bardot in an iconic rendition. All of these subjects are based on commercial magazine and newspaper images. The artist’s use of flat planes of colour, floating on areas of enlarged, half-toned dot patterns, reflects the commercial printing process.

Laing’s work, however, moved quickly into abstract form, and away from painting toward sculpture. In the early 1970s, he made a series of prints called Sculpture in the Landscape, in which he combined his newly developed abstract sculptural forms with his continued interest in printmaking. Again, he makes full use of screen-printing and the flat planes of strong colour that the medium allows.

After his move from New York City to northern Scotland in 1973, Laing’s focus shifted away from printmaking for the first time, and it would be thirty years before he enthusiastically returned to the medium, in 2002. With newfound vigour, he began making screen prints again at this time, with an interest in combining the visual language of pop with the contemporary starlets and celebrity of the twenty-first century – those who had quickly attained iconic status at what was the start of the current reign of social media. He chose for subjects Victoria Beckham, Kate Moss and, most importantly, Amy Winehouse, who appears several times in Laing’s work from this period. Winehouse’s tragic celebrity, combined with the graphic appearance and vintage styling of her monochrome wardrobe and unusual, beehive hairstyle, made her an ideal muse. His prints of Winehouse – including The Kiss, Domestic Perspective and Belshazzar’s Feast – are all based on images of Winehouse that he found in the press. Other prints from this period look back to earlier work; these include screen-print editions of the paintings Anna Karina and Lincoln Convertible. Another important facet of Laing’s later printmaking practice was digital printmaking, used to reproduce a series of his contemporary paintings about the Iraq War. Deeply concerned with political issues, Laing was outraged by Britain’s involvement in this war and felt very strongly about promoting this group of works, all of which were, again, derived from contemporary images in the press. He chose to make them into digital prints, as he wanted the images to be easily affordable and readily available to as many people as possible.

Throughout his career, Laing made radical changes in his work and his output may, at first, seem perplexingly varied. However, closer inspection reveals a consistent, overriding interest in precise geometry; elegant, distilled forms; and bold, flat colour. Prints were a natural choice and an important tool for Laing in exploring these concerns. Looking at his print output as a whole, as illustrated here, foregrounds his recurring interest in form, colour and the aesthetic of commercial printing. The combination of this technique with a personal commentary on culture, celebrity and politics, made through the careful selection of images from the 1960s onwards, has positioned Laing not just at the forefront of the British pop movement, but also within the canon of the most influential international pop artists.