Florence Peake: Enactment

Richard Saltoun is delighted to present 'Enactment', a solo exhibition of queer, multi-disciplinary visual artist Florence Peake. The exhibition presents new installations, sculptures, canvases, and works on paper that continue the artist’s research into the possibilities of painting and complements her major solo at Southwark Park Galleries, running from 16 April to 2 July and touring to Fruitmarket, Edinburgh, in late 2023, and Towner Eastbourne in 2024. Florence Peake produces paintings, sculptures, films, and immersive performances rooted in the body, which are at once sensual and witty, political, and intimate. Focusing on the notions of materiality and physicality, her work...

Florence Peake produces paintings, sculptures, films, and immersive performances rooted in the body, which are at once sensual and witty, political, and intimate. Focusing on the notions of materiality and physicality, her work explores narratives around the experience of aliveness, our bodies, and their multiplicity of being.

Peake’s performances employ dancers, performers, and communities to create lavish choreographies that encourage a seemingly chaotic relationship between the bodies and the material. The artist’s sculptures and paintings are a result of this interaction. They are both an extension and manifestation of the body in motion and a way to capture the profusion of experiences and feelings recorded within our bodies, exploring queerness not only as an identity but as an ontological approach and strategy for making. Using movement and the whole body to create an initial series of marks upon which she builds forms and figures, Peake creates new narratives and multiple layers of meaning while exalting the production process of artworks – the labour, the gesture.

The works in 'Enactment' build on the artist’s performance 'Factual Actual' (National Gallery, 2021), which looked at the idea of the collapse of the canon of the classical white Western painting tradition. As by-products of a live moment, they redefine what performance can be and allow past iterations to take on a new life. A set of postcard-sized works on holographic paper made from photographic documentation of the live work incorporates the stillness of classical compositions. Two gaunt, angular plaster sculptures reclining in a classical repose ironically comment on the rounded perfection of renaissance nudes, as they lay on top of what the artist calls 'Medallions' – paintings cut out from the canvas stretchers that externalise how grief coagulates within our bodies, in lumps as condescended matter. Two interactive, deeply folded canvases expand into space, becoming sculptural installations that offer a visual counterpoint to the richly draped velvets and brocades of historical paintings. Following the artist’s unique methodology, the largest works on view – over 5 metres in length – offer direct visual translation of moving bodies, expanding the notion of painting further and echoing the creative process behind the fifty metres wide painting exhibited at Southwark Park Galleries.

Seamlessly moving between various artistic disciplines, Peake joyfully renders the multifaceted and sensual nature of the contemporary, flesh-bound world, re-imagining and re-framing the procedures, actions and gestures involved in artmaking, and building correspondences between places and times.

Florence Peake is a London-based artist who has been making solo and group performance works intertwined with an extensive visual art practice since 1995. Presenting work internationally and across the UK in galleries, theatres and the public realm, Peake is known for an approach which is at once sensual and witty, expressive and rigorous, political and intimate. Peake produces movement, ...

Florence Peake is a London-based artist who has been making solo and group performance works intertwined with an extensive visual art practice since 1995. Presenting work internationally and across the UK in galleries, theatres and the public realm, Peake is known for an approach which is at once sensual and witty, expressive and rigorous, political and intimate. Peake produces movement, interactive sculpture, paintings that use the whole body's physicality, text, film and drawings which respond and intercept each other to articulate, extend and push ideas.

Peake's work explores notions of materiality and physicality: the body as site and vehicle of protest; the erotic and sensual as tools for queering materiality; the subjective and imagined body as a force equal to those that move in our objective flesh-bound world. By encouraging chaotic relationships between the body and material, Peake creates radical and outlandish performances, which in turn generate temporary alliances and micro-communities within the audience. Peake's painting is as an extension of the body itself: it is produced gesturally and performatively, and is both a manifestation of the external body in motion and the way personal experience and feeling is recorded within the tissue and bones. Their painting practice comes together with sculpture and performance in a reciprocal nature: engaging in a shared dialogue and creating multiple modes of processing performance, and the interrelations between dancers, audiences and sites.

Peake has worked with filmmakers, artists and choreographers including Joe Moran, Gaby Agis, Tai Shani, Jonathan Baldock, Serena Korda, Nicola Conibere, Gary Stevens, Catherine Hoffmann, Eve Stainton, Station House Opera and Theatre of Mistakes. Peake is part of the Hayward Gallery's touring British Art Show 9 (2021). Peake's work has been presented at Arsenic theatre and Sudpol theatre in Switzerland (2020),Venice Biennale 2019; CRAC Occitanie, Sète, France (2018), London Contemporary Music Festival, UK (2018), Bosse & Baum, London, UK (2019); De La Warr Pavilion, Bexhill, UK (2018); Palais De Tokyo, Paris, France (2018); Hayward Gallery, London UK (2018), Wysing Arts Centre, Cambridge, UK (2017), Studio Leigh, London UK (2017); Sara Zanin Gallery, Rome, Italy (2017); Serpentine, London UK (2016); Whitechapel Gallery, London, UK (2016); ICA, London (2016); Modern Art Oxford (2016); BALTIC, Newcastle UK (2013), Frieze, London UK (2013), Yorkshire Sculpture Park (2012).