Next exhibition
At Earth
2 May to 22 May 2011
Open every day 11am–6pm
This three-week long exhibition celebrates the work of London artist Peter Kennard. The exhibition will represent Kennard's practice of forty years through photomontages, paintings, and new digital images made with Tarek Salhany. These works are drawn primarily from Kennard's new book (assisted by Salhany), titled @earth, a 192-page photo-essay (Tate Publishing, £9.99), which will be available from the day of the opening. The book uses images alone to argue that the attempt by a few to dominate the majority and exploit global resources has led to wars and crises of the economy and the environment.
Since the seventies Kennard has been committed to effecting political change by distributing photomontages through the mass media, with remarkable success, notably in the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament. More recently he has used other media, including painting and installation, to address social injustice generally and globally.
Kennard makes images that are immediate and accessible. They are designed to elicit response from a society complacent to image saturation, as well as gallery audiences unused to straightforward and unapologetically emotive statements. In a gallery context Kennard's work questions how images function rhetorically, and how an art that prioritises political effect might look.
Peter Kennard was born in London in 1949. Between 1965 and 1979, he studied at Byam Shaw, the Slade and the Royal College of Art. He has had solo exhibitions at the ICA, London (1981); Barbican, London (1985); and Pump House Gallery, London (2008). Since 1990 he has also had seven solo exhibitions at Gimpel Fils, London. His work has been included in the group exhibitions ‘Rude Britannia’, Tate Britain (2010) (kennardphillipps); ‘Media Burn’, Tate Modern (2006); and ‘Forms of Resistance’, Van Abbemuseum, Eindhoven (2007). Kennard is a senior tutor in Photography at the Royal College of Art, and lives in London.
He's also doing a launch for his new book, 'At Earth' at rough trade east on thursday 12th may, 7pm
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