Peter Kennard, Original photomontages, 1972–96
Raven Row, 56 Artillery Lane, E1 7LS
2 May – 22 May
Shortly after he declared war on Iraq, a picture of Tony Blair began to circulate on the internet. It showed Mr Blair, smiling toothily as he took his own photograph against a backdrop of fiery explosions. A clever piece of Photoshop trickery, the image was a striking elicitation of public opinion of the then prime minister and the war itself.
It was conceived by Peter Kennard – the man behind some of the most iconic anti-war imagery of the past 40 years – and although it doesn’t feature in At Earth, the London-based artist’s latest retrospective currently being held at Raven Row, its characteristically dark satirical rhetoric is present throughout the works in show; from an image of a fully-armed soldier taking the field in a floodlit and packed out football stadium, to one depicting a group of well-dressed and no doubt well-off gamblers crowding around a blackjack table, placing bets using nuclear warheads rather than chips.
Working mainly in the medium of photomontage, Kennard uses canny juxtapositions to highlight the moral wrongs of the world. By manipulating existing and often familiar imagery, he creates disturbing dystopian visions, which subjugate the viewer into agreement with his persuasive polemic.
In his earliest works – which he used to bolster support for the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament – this involved quite crudely cutting and pasting images of nuclear arms into the most unlikely of places; into the hands of the glamorous and the rich, into the mouthpiece of a gas mask and even on top of the cart in a reproduction of John Constable’s The Hay Wain.
Following this, other motifs began appearing in his work as his political agenda began to grow, encompassing issues and themes including environmentalism, poverty and war. The artist also extended his practice beyond the handmade photomontage, flexing his painterly muscles in a series of anti-war prints in which he painted red targets over grainy and enlarged photographs of civilians, and experimenting in digital media in a large number of works, including one that gradiates a greyscale image of the Earth into that of a pollution emitting power station, and another that transposes an aerial view of a shanty town onto that of a sky scraper- filled city.
Much like the stark messages behind them, many of his works are in black and white: they are executed with varying degrees of subtlety, and so with varying degrees of success. The overall effect of his oeuvre, however, cannot be denied or indeed ignored. Kennard has achieved a rare sort of notoriety for his work, which is celebrated by art institutions (his work appears in the Tate and the V&A collections), the national press (he has featured in every one of the UK’s national broadsheets) and the general public alike.
This exhibition, which expounds the full length and breadth of the artist’s career and staunch left wing ideology, will make you laugh, ponder and indeed re-think your own moral and political agenda, and will leave you in no doubt as to why he has enjoyed the success that he has.
