Ubicua presents Other Paths a retrospective celebration of globally recognised, multi-disciplinary artist Roger Dean. This is the first time a varied selection of his work has been exhibited in London for over a decade.

For a generation coming of age during the 1970s the work of Roger Dean was an

important introduction to the future possibilities of creative art and design. In the

decades since, his uniquely distinctive, imagined and phenomenological ‘realities’ have influenced areas of cinema, animation, graphics and product design.

Dean’s extensive output features worlds characterised by vertiginous topography,

biophilic dwellings, levitating trees, waterfalls without sources and mechanical beasts. Images which stir perceptions of places, and creations that simultaneously feel long ago and far ahead. His angular creature-like typography is immediately recognisable on the covers of books, posters and record sleeves.

This exhibition focuses on three key areas of Dean’s work: his music-related graphics, his spatial design, and his wider vision of imagined realities. Alongside a group of recent vibrant paintings, the exhibition will include early examples of his well-known album cover designs as well as architectural proposals and sketchbooks.

At a time when the experience of reality is again under question, Dean’s work is taking on new prescience. With the rationality of modernist thinking no longer underpinning the world of design, Dean’s visions now appear much more plausible and immediate in the context of augmented realities. Today, his work is of interest to a new generation of young creatives for whom a multidisciplinary approach to image, spatial design and music is very much the norm.

Born out of the utopian spirit of an earlier technological space age and understood in the realms of futuristic fantasy, Dean’s designs have always reflected a philosophical attitude in keeping with contemporary attitudes: concerns for psychological and environmental well-being, that embraces the close synthesis of the human, technological organic.

Dean’s work has always questioned the nature of a received reality and is not defined only by the fashion of the day. Blending the natural and technological, the futuristic and the ancient, his imagery has always fused an idea of the new with an attitude rooted firmly in the traditions and conditions of the past. A present that is not determined by any given period.

Andrew Cross

Curator