Mihai Nicodim Gallery is proud to present “Boydem” - the first solo show in the US of British artist Eddie Peake (b. 1981).
Eddie Peake’s practice comprises a broad array of media including painting, photography, sculpture, performance, video and installation, which can sometimes interplay with one another, or they can exist individually. A general theme of nostalgia coupled with an ongoing narrative related to Peake’s personal history, and its collisions with more broadly or culturally available histories, weaves through his practice to varying degrees of visibility.
An important aspect of Eddie Peake’s practice is a fascination with language, or more specifically, the discrepancy that occurs when one mode of language is translated into another, for instance verbal language into visual language. This aspect of his practice does not necessarily come to the fore in a visible sense, but it constantly governs his thoughts.
The poster/painting works presented in this show play with a contrast in the form, medium and content of the paintings and the prints, and as such, any link between the two elements has appeared to be incidental. The series of images used for the prints in “Boydem” mark a departure from Peake’s previous work, in the sense that, for the first time, they are much more explicitly doing the job of "framing" the paintings.
The same male model, an artist friend of Peake’s, appears in all the images, and positions his body in such a way that when a painting is eventually placed over the print, it may be framed by an arm and a leg, or in the space between his spread-apart legs, for example. The posters’ candid physical imagery is sugarcoated by the bright hues of his perfectly crafted glossy oil paintings. The ambiguous political and psychological content behind them inhabits a candy world of luminous, acidic colors, which exists within the artificial confines of Peake’s painterly language.
Eddie Peake was born in London in 1981. He graduated from the Slade in 2006, was a 2008-09 scholar at the British School at Rome and is currently completing his Masters degree at the Royal Academy, London. Recent solo exhibitions include The Loving Clutches of My Hands at Southard Reid, London and History at Lorcan OʼNeill Gallery, Rome, as well as performances at V22 (Contrapposto Pause), Auto Italia Live (Huh!) and Paws, for Lucky PDF TV, at Barbican, London. Group shows include Glaze curated by George Henry Longly at Bischoff Weiss, and Young London at V22. He has a solo exhibition in March 2012 at Cell Project Space, London.
