Important work by controversial Pop Artist Gerald Laing will be shown for the first time in London. Laing’s War Paintings and other works with political themes, including the assassination of John F Kennedy and the Cuban Missile Crisis of 1962, Gerald Laing began this group of work directly after viewing the Baghdad bombings on television, described by Cheney as delivering “shock and awe” to an undefended city. The images of torture at Abu Ghraib prison have further influenced his work, as shown in the paintings Awe Shucks, Look Mickey and American Gothic. The heroes and starlets from The American Dream, which initially influenced Laing’s subject matter in the early 1960s, have now been replaced by the greed and violence offered by war. With an increasingly politicised subject matter, Laing has reverted to his original pop medium after a long preoccupation with sculpture. The resulting work is a series of highly-charged paintings which convey his loathing of our involvement in Iraq and the foreign policy which made it possible.