Michael Peel

MODERN WORLD

EXTRACTS & DEVICES

24rd February – 19th March 2011

Private View Tue 22^nd Feb 6-9pm

This exhibition brings together work from the ‘MODERN WORLD’ Posterwork series and two recent works which act as contingent devices within the concept of this show.

During the 1980s Peel began to make work that was deliberately designed to exist outside the commercial gallery system. Entitled ‘MODERN WORLD’, these large, screen-printed posterworks were made in response to political events and the politicians who were in power at the time. They were fly-posted on streets in London, mailed to educational institutions and shown as framed prints in galleries and museums.

His recent work has all been made since the invasion of Iraq and the war in Afghanistan, and develops the concerns and subject matter with which he has been preoccupied for some time. Politics, power and social issues have been addressed through the language of print and photography and have been realised as limited edition prints, montages, posterworks and installations.

Peel’s imagery is often appropriated from the media and is collaged together with images derived from nature, anatomy and biology, in order to reflect the photomechanical structure of mass production material and its parallels with biological cellular structures. All of this can be seen as a metaphor for the political discourse that followed 9/11, and the prosecution of the ‘war on terror’. The intimidating, highly charged words and phrases which accompanied the build-up to war, and which have justified it since, are aggressively deployed in a manner which serves to isolate them and deprive them of authority.