Dr Charley Peters

Biography

Charley Peters is a painter based in London. Recent exhibitions include Splintered Binary, Gossamer Fog, London, A5xn, dalla Rosa Gallery, London, Counter Shift, Art 3, New York, Tutti Frutti, Turps Gallery, London, Punti di Vista/Viewpoints, Z20 Sara Zanin Gallery, Rome and Tracing Fields, Ten Haaf Projects, Amsterdam.

Her paintings are concerned with the spatial potential of the painted surface, on which she applies subtle variations in colour, tone and scale to construct illusionary light and structural depth. Using techniques of layering and juxtaposition Peters explores the disrupted syntax of pictorial composition synonymous with our experiences of reading space, material and subject in the post-digital image world.

Peters has contributed writing about painting to online and print publications that include A-N, Turps Banana, Abstract Critical and Saturation Point. She is a peer reviewer for The Journal of Contemporary Painting and an independent curator, recently organising the group exhibition Merge Visible, Contemporary British Painting through a Virtual Window for the Contemporary British Painting group.

She completed a PhD in Fine Art Theory and Practice in 2006 and has held academic posts in Fine Art and Critical Theory at institutions including University of the Arts London, Manchester Metropolitan University and Victoria and Albert Museum.


I am interested in the positioning of contemporary painting in the context of a digital, dematerialised world. I work predominantly as a painter, making work that utilses abstract forms but which may not overtly be viewed as abstract, moving away from the modernist ideal of pure form towards references of the virtual world within the real world. Today, we experience most images by looking at screens and monitors, often seeing numerous windows of visual information simultaneously. The aesthetic of the screen has become an intrinsic part of our lives and my paintings acknowledges and explores this.

As a writer and curator I work with material relating to post-analogue painting, hard-edged and systems based abstraction. In 2017 I organised Merge Visible: Contemporary British Painting through a Virtual Window, exploring the impact of the digital image world on recent painting practices. I was the curator of Generator: Systems, Logic and the Art of Analogue Programming in 2015, an exhibition of artists’ work whose practices are generative, created using analogue visual systems to ‘programme’ the form of the work. I have recently completed an article for Turps Banana painting magazine based on research into the archive of Jean Spencer, member of the UK Systems Group, held at Chelsea College of Arts, UAL, due for publication in 2017.