- Venue
- Waddington Galleries
- Location
- London
Sir Peter Blake has been in recluse lately, but this latest exhibition of work that reflects his interests in other artists is nothing short of imaginative. Alongside Richard Hamilton, Sir Peter is credited as one of the inventors of Pop Art, broadening the avant-garde stranglehold of Dadaism to the consumerist population.
Sir Peter became immortal to the predominant population when in 1967 he was hired to create the now-infamous album cover to the Beatles’ Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band record. Blake’s combination of the figurative and collage with hybrid colours brought him to the art world as a force for good to the somewhat dominant period of Abstract Expressionists. The homage to Damien Hirst, winner of the Turner Prize in 1995, is something exuberantly miraculous, weaving modern day ‘fairy tales’ of character in their own worlds. Of course, all these homage’s bear a well spotted visual likeliness to their influences. Hirst’s butterflies and love of collection (and the colour blue), with Rauschenberg’s use of everyday found materials represent their artists within incredible accuracy.
Blake seems almost constrained in his own world by particularly referencing Modern artists of the 1950s such as Rauschenberg or H.C. Westermann and only a select few Contemporary practitioners such as Hirst. The exhibit feels like an examination of Blake’s own use of appropriation against other such artists, testing the viewer’s knowledge of theories like Steinberg’s ‘flatbed plane’ and aestheticism.
In all, the exhibit promises a worldspace of Art History versus Pop and its place in today’s art scene.
