PETER WYLIE

It is a pleasure to present this exhibition of oil paintings by London based artist Peter Wylie, opening coincidentally on his 69th birthday. It reflects his two longstanding passions: for iconic 20th Century architecture and for the North Sea along the coast from his native Lowestoft. In the print room will also be displayed etchings of buildings by Le Corbusier and Goldfinger and a series of Suffolk bunkers.

Peter Wylie's enthusiasm starts with the Bauhaus Modernism of Gropius and Le Corbusier, particularly the latter whose buildings he has visited extensively. He has even gone so far as to collect flakes of paint from Le Corbusier's Cité de Refuge and incorporate them into some of his paintings.

Just as Le Corbusier's idealistic modular, concrete buildings have at times gone out of fashion, suffered neglect and then been renovated for new generations, so have some of the later brutalist buildings of Lubetkin, Lasdun, Goldfinger, the Barbican buildings of Chamberlain, Powell and Bon and the Park Hill estate by Smith and Lynn in Sheffield. Peter does not present these monolithic buildings as tidy abstract shapes but as a bit skewed (as he saw them from the ground) and as the habitation of many people, whose existence can be glimpsed or imagined from the treatment of each window.

“North Sea studies are about a journey that I make several times a year from one seaside town to another. They are also about another journey, so where once I looked out to the horizon and imagined my father somewhere catching fish, I now look out and imagine that across the sea, now almost empty of boats snd ships, at the water’s end another land begins, and on that shore the waves will be breaking under ever-changing skies just as they do here.”

Peter Wylie was born in Lowestoft in 1956. After Foundation Studies in Lowestoft (1974-75) he took a BA in Fine Art from Canterbury College of Art (1975-78), an MA from Cyprus College of Art (1978-79) and later another MA in Fine Art Printmaking from Camberwell College of Art, London (2015-17). He has shown consistently in solo and mixed shows since 1978.