The sexual revolution was in full swing in London in 1967 when Australian artist Martin Sharp decided to give Beauty and the Beast a psychedelic makeover.

Sharp was having fun with the familiar fantasy, filtered through the imagery of King Kong. The old romantic tale is transformed into a very 1960s vocabulary of sex, colour, humour and a healthy dose of visual excess.

The work came out of Sharp’s extraordinary London years as art director of the underground magazine Oz, where he gleefully poked holes in respectable society and its rules around censorship, sex and convention. Sex! was published by Big O Posters Ltd, established in 1967 specifically to promote and distribute Sharp’s distinctive psychedelic graphics. Like his celebrated designs for Cream and Jimi Hendrix, the image belongs to the visual language of Swinging London - but it also carries something unmistakably Sharp: surrealism, humour, sexual innuendo and a gleeful disregard for good taste.

Printed in vivid black, blue and pink on reflective silver foil, Sex! was made to grab attention - and it still does. The shimmering surface, outrageous colour and enormous typography make it part poster, part Pop Art, part psychedelic provocation.

The work was later included in Pop to Popism at the Art Gallery of New South Wales, confirming its place in the history of Australian Pop and contemporary art.

For collectors of Pop Art and art that gets straight to the point, this work of art makes its intentions perfectly clear.

Martin SHARP (1942 - 2013)
'Sex!' 1967
screenprint on paper
Image Size: 75 x 50 cm
Dimensions: 89 x 64 x 4 cm
Comes with Letter of Provenance

Exhibited: Pop to popism, Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney, 01 Nov 2014–01 Mar 2015

Another impression of this work is in the collection of the Art Gallery of NSW: Accession number 24.2014

The print is in very good condition overall, with some creasing to the paper. The creasing is secondary to the work’s extraordinary visual impact - in person, its colour, scale and reflective surface create an energy that photographs simply cannot capture.

(c) Martin Sharp / Copyright Agency