Peter Sedgley: 5 Decades
A survey, a retrospective of one art’s great enigmas.
The below is an extract from the catalogue for Peter Sedgley: 5 Decades published by The Redfern Gallery
Peter Sedgley Portrait in his studio.
Pulling from Within
The paradox of deconstructing Peter Sedgley’s enigma returns me to the artist’s most substantive catalogue, produced in 1996, and authored entirely by the artistPeter Sedgley: Painting, Kinetics, Installations, 19641996. The cover is a picture of restraint –or at least in my case. The copy that I have is entirely blank bar for a mere ‘S’ printed atop a faded Royal Blue. Inside its pages, it seems that Sedgley has decided to nullify certain assumptions. There is ‘no Sedgley idiom’, he professes. He also dismisses artistic movements and ‘isms.’ 7 Conversely, nearly a decade later, in a 2004 exhibition catalogue, Jasia Reichardt, former director of Whitechapel Gallery, London and curator of the landmark exhibit, Cybernetic Serendipity, which was held at the Institute of Contemporary Arts London in 1968 professes to Sedgley’s legendary status. She begins by asserting that he is the only British artist to be associated with all three of the movements associated with illusion, light and motion: ‘Op Art, Kinetic Art and Light Art.’
Peter Sedgley, Binaries (1965).
I return to the mid 1960s, my hand gliding over an exhibition guide produced for an exhibition at McRoberts & Tunnard Gallery held at 34 Curzon Street, London. Here, the philosopher Cyril Barrett locates the reader by articulating the influence of Kandinsky and Klee on the artist. Sedgley has repeatedly professed that Klee and Goethe fuelled his disciplinary studies in colour.
The cover of the pleated accordion-like matte booklet showcases a painting called, Cycle, 1965. It looks like Kandinsky on acid. Peering at it nearly 60 years since it was printed, this round foil is at first suggestive of an abyss, that is, until the gaze, the spectrum of colour circulates around this orb, revealing the finely tuned details. Lines that shimmer, suggestive of energy. The eye wanders back up the spectrum and around again.
Peter Sedgley, Cryptic (1982)
Examining the space between the lines, what is within the interstice, is perhaps at the core of Sedgley’s aesthetic practice. Marker pen and ink drawings on large paper such as Eye Sign, 1982 or Zotow IV, 1982, evidently embody the disciplined Op Art techniques of his comrade in arms, Bridget Riley. They are also whether he likes it or not very Sedgley. They both boast their own sense of chaos—of an unfurling that is about to begin. It is a much messier dance, and he, and we, by turn are okay with that. Reflecting back on Riley and Sedgley’s relationship, it is evident that a kinship of form and mind continues to exist to this day.
According to one source, Riley attributes Sedgley with teaching about ‘geometry so that I could make the things I know out to be’. The irony is that with Sedgley nothing transpires to be what we had first assumed it to be. Returning to Eye Sign and Zotow IV, although at first are seemingly monochromatic, they both correspondingly rupture the notion of stillness. With each glance, the in and the out breath, the body ascends into perpendicular cross-sections that are finely carved out into the landscape.
Peter Sedgley, Touch (1966)
*All images courtesy of The Redfern Gallery, London