Peter Blake

Peter Blake became well known in the 1950s as a British Pop artist, utilizing imagery from advertisements and music posters to render collages on immaculately flat paintings. Inspired by Robert Rauschenberg and Jasper Johns, he had a love for the ephemera of modern times, tattoos, illustration, and folklore. In addition to painted collages, Blake made imitation bulletin boards with reclaimed printed matter and dioramas, entranced by the emblems and iconography of the 1960s. His participation in the Young Contemporaries exhibition in 1961 with David Hockney and R.B. Kitaj solidified his standing in the London Pop art movement. The artist was commission by The Beatles to create the slipcover for Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band in 1967, which catapulted his involvement in the music scene. He went on to create album art for The Who, Band Aid, Oasis, and Paul Weller, among others, between 1967 and the late 1990s. In the early 1970s, he left London for the rural countryside of Bath, originated the Brotherhood of Ruralists, and began painting landscapes to counteract the impulse of social commentary in art and the abstraction of the avant-garde. He moved back to London in 1979, returning to his old ways—melding popular culture with fine art. 

Throughout his career Blake has exhibited at the Institute of Contemporary Arts, London, National Museum Cardiff, Wales, Tate Liverpool, United Kingdom, Tate Modern, London, Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam, Museo de Bellas Artes, Bilbao, and many more. He also has his own gallery of sleeve art at the University of Leeds in the School of Music. The artist has been commissioned for public works including the carpet at the Supreme Court of the United Kingdom’s Middlesex Guildhall, and an image for Liverpool’s European Capital of Culture campaign. Among other awards, Blake was knighted in 2002.