Project LSD – organized by Rob Tufnell

June 13 to August 23, 2015

‘LSD’ is an exhibition organized by London-based curator and gallerist Rob Tufnell. For the project, Tufnell invited 16 artists to create new works on ‘blotter’ paper, more commonly associated with the distribution of Lysergic Acid Diethylamide or LSD.

Writing about the project Tufnell states:

“Discovered by Albert Hofmann in 1938, mass manufactured for use in psychiatry by the pharmaceutical manufacturer Sandoz from 1947 and utilized by the CIA in the 1950s, Lysergic Acid Diethylamide, or LSD-25, was banned in 1967 after its widespread adoption by the counter culture.”

This ongoing project includes editions by Art & Language, Thomas Bayrle, Henning Bohl, Steven Claydon, Jeremy Deller, Jim Drain, Liam Gillick, Rodney Graham, Mark Leckey, Aleksandra Mir, Tal R, David Shrigley, Philip Taaffe, Mungo Thomson, Pae White, and Richard Wright.

The prints follow an invitation to the artists involved to design a sheet of ‘blotter’ (without the active ingredient of Lysergic Acid Diethylamide). The resulting designs have each been reproduced in editions of 100 offset lithographic prints. The works at once (do we need the word “once”) look back to the shamanic, drug-induced rituals of prehistory and to the signatory grid of Modernism.