Sir Peter Blake paints his peers in exhibition of new works

Damien Hirst and Tracey Emin amongst his subjects

Peter Blake, one of the leading figures of British Pop Art, will exhibit work from two series 1-10 and Marcel Duchamp’s World Tour in his forthcoming exhibition at Waddington Galleries, London 19 October – 12 November 2005.

1-10 emphasizes the variety of Blake’s style exploring techniques from drawing, collage and assemblage, to sculpture and painting and using materials including paper, wood and stone, found objects, pencil, and bronze.

In Marcel Duchamp’s World Tour each painting follows a fantasy journey in which Marcel Duchamp encounters artists including Damien Hirst, Pablo Picasso and Edward Hopper, along with popular idols, Tarzan, Elvis and The Spice Girls. In The Artist’s Fancy Dress Ball, Blake borrows renowned images from the history of art, painting Picasso dressed as Touchstone from Shakespeare’s As you Like it taken from Johan Zoffany's 18th Century portrait of Thomas King. Picasso is joined by Edward Hopper and Marcel Duchamp dressed as figures from Picasso's Family of Saltimbanques and Damien Hirst shown as Jean-Antoine Watteau’s Pierrot. In Playing Chess with Tracey, Duchamp plays chess with Tracey Emin in the desert surroundings of her video self-portrait, Sometimes…, while three enigmatic cowboys wait in the background.

Born in 1932 in Dartford, Kent, Sir Peter Blake studied at Gravesend School of Art before attending the Royal Academy of Art, London. His first one-man exhibition was held in1962 at the Portal Gallery; solo shows followed at the Robert Fraser Gallery (1965) and at Leslie Waddington Prints (1969). Since the early 1970s, his work has been exhibited regularly in solo shows worldwide, including the Nishimura Gallery, Tokyo (1988) and the Govinda Gallery, Washington D.C. (1992).

Retrospective exhibitions of his work have been held at the City Art Gallery, Bristol (1969); at the Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam (1973), which then toured to Hamburg and Brussels; and at the Tate Gallery, London in 1983. In 1994 he was made the Third Associate Artist of the National Gallery, London. He was elected a member of the Royal Academy in 1981, and was knighted in 2002. His works are held in public collections including the Arts Council England, Museum Moderner Kunst, Vienna, Tate Gallery, London, Museum of Modern Art, New York, and the Thyssen-Bornemisza, Austria.

He lives and works in Chiswick.

October 4, 2005