The Redfern Gallery in association with artPost21 presents Peter Sedgley: 5 Decades
Conceived in dialogue with the artist, The Redfern Gallery and Dr Omar Kholeif. The exhibition is dedicated to the artist’s late wife, Ingeborg Lommatzsch.
Peter Sedgley, Wall Plant (kinetic light piece), 1990, Dichroic glass and motor, 13 x 12 x 12cm
Conceived in dialogue with the artist, The Redfern Gallery and Dr Omar Kholeif.
This exhibition is a landmark event. Presenting the work of pioneering artist Peter Sedgley (born 1930), the project has been developed in close dialogue with the artist, his family, as well as several of his long-standing creative interlocutors. Jasia Reichardt, former director of Whitechapel Gallery, London once noted that Peter Sedgley is ‘the only British artist to have been associated with all of the movements dealing with illusion in the 1960s…Op art, kinetic art and light art.’
It is Sedgley’s extraordinary dynamism - working with paint and light, glass and the natural elements that have secured his place as one of the leading exponents of Op Art as a field of practice and of contemplative thought.
Self-taught, he developed an early interest in colour theory, influenced by reading Goethe and Klee. He found almost instant recognition for his series of large-scale paintings, in which he sought to “establish a tonal range following the chromatic order, so that a pure colour can be equated tonally with a mutated colour”. When unveiled in his first solo show at McRoberts and Tunnard, the exhibits were sold to the Tate as well as the Arts Council of Great Britain. A year later, he was included in ‘The Responsive Eye’, at the Museum of Modern Art, New York. This seminal survey show was the first to provide a comprehensive overview of such new trends in modern art, which was soon to become known as Op Art. The paintings of Josef Albers, Frank Stella, Vasarely and compatriot, Bridget Riley all featured in this large-scale exhibition.
Cover of ‘The Responsive Eye’ Exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art, New York in 1965. Cover adapting the work of artist Bridget Riley.
This is the first retrospective survey of Peter Sedgley’s work since 1996. Many of the works presented here have not been on show since their creation, some forty or more years ago. Peter Sedgley: 5 Decades is accompanied by a fully illustrated catalogue, co-edited and with an extensive essay by the exhibition’s co-curator Dr Omar Kholeif, who has served as a longstanding trustee, resident artist, and a former co-director of SPACE, the UK’s largest artist support agency and studio provider which Sedgley co-founded with Bridget Riley and Peter Townshend in 1968.
Photo of Sedgley by Ingeborg Lommatzsch.