Cyril Power 'Lifts' 1930 Linocut Exhibition Poster

A linocut by Cyril Power depicting two high-speed lifts in motion, produced circa 1930 as a commercial commission for the London elevator manufacturer Hammond Bros & Champness. This poster imagines a spring 1962 survey exhibition of Power's commercial and applied work, hosted by a fictional trade body, the London Institute for the Publicity Trades, at a gallery space in Southwark.

Power trained as an architect before turning to printmaking in his fifties, co-founding the Grosvenor School of Modern Art in London in 1925 with Iain McNab and Claude Flight. Under Flight's teaching, Power adopted the colour linocut as his primary medium, producing a body of work preoccupied with the mechanised rhythms of modern urban life: escalators, tube stations, sporting crowds, and — in this case — the vertical thrust of commercial lift shafts. The image was originally commissioned by Harold Champness, a partner in the elevator firm and Power's brother-in-law, and appeared as a line-block advertisement in the trade journal The Builder in January 1930.

The composition uses spiralling viridian forms and jagged red diagonals to convey the velocity and mechanical rhythm of ascent and descent. In the edition state, Power simplified the design by removing a fourth block that had delineated the cables and staircase, leaving the two lift cars to accelerate through an open shaft — a pared-back image whose plunging, vertiginous space owes something to Vorticism.

Our poster recontextualises this commercial commission as exhibition material, framing Power's applied design work within the post-war culture of trade guilds, industry exhibitions, and public education programmes. The typography uses a condensed sans-serif in Power's own red and viridian palette, with the utilitarian directness of publicly funded exhibition graphics from the early 1960s.

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