“When I was young I wanted art that would lift off – that would levitate, gyrate, bring together different – perhaps contradictory aspects of my being” Gustav Metzger

Gustav Metzger(1926-2017) was one of the foremost figures of the post-war avant-garde in Britain, with a career has spanned over 60 years of art and political activism.

In 2014 Kettle’s Yard presented LIFT OFF! - an ambitious exhibition bringing together archive, film, sculpture and installations focusing on a less familiar but central area of Metzger’s practice – his auto-creative process driven work – the alter ego of his better-known auto-destructive practice. The exhibition marked something of a homecoming for Metzger, who began his artistic career at the Cambridge School of Art in 1944 and returned to deliver two seminal lecture/demonstrations (1960/1965) at the University of Cambridge.

This publication documents the artist’s most ephemeral Auto-Creative artworks of the 1960s, and new works created by Metzger especially for LIFT OFF! It includes new texts by curator Elizabeth Fisher that illuminate this less well known aspect of Metzger’s practice.