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“Peter Kennard's work is haunting. Eschewing words, it insists upon not being forgotten. He is a master of the medium of photomontage. His images are impossible to convey with words because of their unmistakable visual texture, pure and dirty, suggesting a strange amalgam of X-ray, satellite image and slag. The future - which for so long was a mine of gory rhetoric for those holding power - today depends upon those who insist upon looking beyond their lifetime. And to do this we have to scrutinise, like Peter Kennard, our nightmares and suppressed hopes. His art cannot be ignored.”
– John Berger, The Guardian
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Peter KENNARD
Kent State, 1970Photomontage – Dyeline print152 x 101.5 cm -
Video created on the occasion of the exhibition ‘Art Against War: Peter Kennard and the CND Movement’ at Millennium Gallery, Sheffield, 2018
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“Peter Kennard has been producing his politically radical photomontages for 50 years. We need people who carry on fighting the good fight. People who keep their focus despite the changing cultural and political landscape. The message is consistent – the message is clear – the message is true. The message is uncompromising, brutal and hard-hitting – but also very beautiful, it’s beautiful because it wants to keep us alive. It’s a jolt of electricity. A shot in the arm. A kick up the backside. You know what? It’s a wake-up call.”
– Jarvis Cocker
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“Kennard sees the skull beneath the skin all right: an area dominated by greed, indifference, ruthlessness, naked force against the powerless; the Holy Grail of the Big Buck. He weaves a brilliant and ghastly tapestry about power, desolation, destruction, death and ‘the market’. Kennard forces us to inhabit a grotesque and oppressive prison from which there is no escape. The prisoner is the human spirit, chained, shackled, wasted, reduced, throttled.”
– Harold Pinter
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Peter KENNARD
Mandela, 1990Photomontage - Gelatin silver prints and wood on card43 x 55 cm -
‘Peter Kennard’s work is a harrowing x-ray of the shadow side of the world that perfectly captures the brutal asymmetries of our age: heavy weaponry trained on broken people, all-seeing technologies and disappearing identities, perpetually exhaling Industry and an asphyxiating planet.’
- NAOMI KLEIN