Peter Blake: A Retrospective
29 June – 23 September 2007
Tate Liverpool
Albert Dock
Liverpool, L3 4BB
Curated by Christoph Grunenberg and Laurence Sillars
Peter Blake is often described as the godfather of Pop art. At the core of Blake’s work has been his fascination with the world of popular culture and entertainment, including music, film and sports. Blake’s pioneering images of the 1950s and 1960s, including On the Balcony (1955-57), Self-Portrait with Badges (1961), The Toy Shop (1962) and The Beatles (1963-68), are iconic not only within art history but as more popular recordings of the social preoccupations of that time. Yet as this exhibition shows, his work goes far beyond this. From his earliest work of the 1950s, Blake’s paintings and drawings have been fundamental to the traditions of figurative realism in this the UK and abroad. His engagement with the Victorian imagination, myth and folklore during the 1970s as a Ruralist continued his nostalgic pursuit of a dream world while introducing a new cast of characters and themes. Since the 1980s, a substantial body of work has developed out of an increasingly conceptual and self-evaluative practice. Peter Blake: A Retrospective provides a comprehensive survey of his rich and diverse oeuvre from the late 1940s to the present concentrating on the media of painting, drawing and printmaking.
The exhibition is accompanied by a richly illustrated catalogue, the most comprehensive publication on the artist to date, with essays by Simon Faulkner, Christoph Grunenberg, Marco Livingstone and Laurence Sillars.
