Peter Peryer: Celebrated photographer returns to the Dowse

MEDIA RELEASE

For immediate release: 12 August 2014

Celebrated photographer returns to the Dowse

The Dowse Art Museum is proud to present Peter Peryer: A Careful Eye, an exhibition of images by one of New Zealand’s most renowned artists.

Potent, uncanny, beautiful and strange, Peter Peryer’s photographs capture the mystery in objects and scenes we often take for granted in everyday life—and the stories which can be found in them. Bringing together over 50 photographs, the exhibition reveals the compositional and thematic motifs that Peryer has employed over 40 years of art-making.

Peter Peryer: A Careful Eye ‘book-ends’ Peryer’s career to date starting in 1977 when Jim Barr, then director of The Dowse Art Museum staged the first solo exhibition of Peryer’s work in a public gallery: Peter Peryer: An Introduction. The exhibition showed 29 images, including portraits and other works from his various portfolios at the time.

In 2014, Peter Peryer: A Careful Eye, curated by Sian van Dyk, pays tribute to this earlier exhibition. Hunua (1975), a work from the Mars Hotel portfolio that was exhibited at The Dowse in 1977 draws links between Peryer’s current practice and earlier series.

Courtney Johnston, current director of The Dowse says it is a pleasure to strengthen The Dowse’s relationship with Peter Peryer with this new exhibition. “When Jim Barr showed Peter’s work in 1977, photography was still a fledgling medium in the public art gallery environment, and a solo show of a photographer was almost unheard of. It was a bold move by Barr and one of the first such exhibitions in New Zealand. This new exhibition shows how vital and engaging Peter’s work continues to be. There is no conversation about contemporary New Zealand photography without reference to Peter Peryer”.

Peter Peryer: A Careful Eye is accompanied by a catalogue that includes essays by Sian van Dyk and Jim Barr. The catalogue was generously supported by Creative New Zealand and the Charnwood Trust.

Exhibition details:

Peter Peryer: A Careful Eye

23 August-23 November 2014| FREE Entry
www.dowse.org.nz

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