Gustav Metzger was born in Nuremberg in 1926 and has lived in England since1939. Politically active in his youth, he pursued his ideals through visual art as well as public and theoretical practices.
His manifesto for "Auto-Destructive Art" was published in 1959, proning art forms that exposed the damage done to nature and mankind due to unchecked overproduction and consumerism, an art that also faced up to the permanent threat of massive destruction by nuclear weapons. Writing in 1961, he declared "Auto-destructive art re-enacts the obsession with destruction, the pummelling to which individuals and masses are subjected. Auto-destructive art demonstrates man's power to accelerate disintegrative processes of nature and to order them."  His Destruction In Art Symposium (DIAS) in 1966 united a number of leading avant-garde artists, and by the late seventies he was instigating an all-out artists' strike.
Early in the 1990s, Metzger began a series of Historic Photographs with the aim of physically confronting viewers with the reality behind the imagery. He employed mixed media, often recycled and bearing the marks of previous use or corroded by time evoking not only his own personal past but also a pacifist political agenda and pioneering awareness of ecological issues.

 Initiated by the Serpentine Gallery, London, this retrospective covers the breadth of Metzger's activities including archival material, artworks and installations. It is accompanied by a specially commissioned catalogue.