Urban Art Association

Pleased you like it! (did you buy one?)

Cool. Contact me for artist discount!!

Forgot to post this, great show and still plenty of time to go see it...

Since his first solo exhibition in 1968 Peter Kennard has consistently held a mirror up to the contemporary world with the aim of enacting social and political change. On the 40th anniversary of his first show, Gimpel Fils is pleased to present a retrospective exhibition of paintings made in the wake of the turbulent student uprisings of May 1968.

Kennard’s Stop paintings mark the beginning of what has become a remarkable artistic career. The visual imagery found in these paintings, from the outstretched hand to the silhouetted paratrooper, was to reoccur in Kennard’s photomontage work throughout the 1970s and 1980s losing none of their visceral power. Kennard’s radical political stance to the war in Vietnam and the Soviet military clampdown in Czechoslovakia finds visual form in these paintings. As a member of a growing disaffected youth culture Kennard’s work voiced the concerns of a generation. Having grown up during the height of the Cold War this generation saw the increased global military activity of the 1960s as a return to an old world order.

Yeah there are plenty as the unsigned were first to be sold at Santas Ghetto 06. I've got one myself.

They were about £20 I seem to remember.

Great print.

I think the impact of the imagery in this print will deminish quickly over time.

I think the opposite, if ever a picture spoke a thousand words..

SHOWS STILL ON...

Was struck by this image when I saw the photos from The Big Issue night. Its not on the site though. When is it available and at what price?

Now on sale.

Dude have you been on holiday!? Its been around since August and I have seven left. Thanks for the mention!!
Also have the original plate for sale.


Carl

www.thecommentfactory.com/peter-kennard-remembers-his-friend-harold-pinter/

We must all shout louder; a great voice for humanity has gone. Harold Pinter died on Christmas Eve. In his writing he took the everyday speech of the ordinary people of London and made it resonate with the crimes of the 20th and 21st centuries.

He put flesh onto the pared-down voice of Beckett. The people in his plays lived in real lodging houses and walked on the actual streets of Hackney where he was born and grew up. Through the use of silence and the detail of everyday speech he showed that our conversations are all about a struggle to maintain our status and position.

Pinter was able to cut through the political lies dribbling from the mouths of our leaders by speaking in such a direct way. Commentators argued he was resorting to cliché, whereas in fact he wanted to cut through the sludge of imperialist language and find the humans struggling underneath it.

This made him a hated figure amongst the toadies of power who treated his political speeches as an aberration, rather than as being the deep embodiment of everything he wrote. His poems have been especially vilified as being “juvenile” and “simplistic” whereas the whole point of them is to find a language that can shock us in to feeling the horrors of war, especially the invasion of Iraq in which he wrote a number of painfully honest poems.

His Nobel prize acceptance speech is one of the great statements expressing the vital connection between art and politics, and should be read by all young creative people. He knew that the blurring of the line between art and politics was key to the developing resistance against oppression and ecological catastrophe that we are in the midst of. And he always encouraged practitioners in any art form who were trying to find way to give form to this reality. In my own case, he wrote an introduction to my book-length poem Domesday Book, and on one memorable occasion came to an exhibition of mine in July 2004 when he had already been ill for some time, and stood on a box outside the gallery to read his anti-war poems.

Friends of mine still think of it as one of the most memorable cultural/political moments of their life. The fact that he was ill and this was a tiny gathering outside a gallery off Oxford Street made it all the more moving that he would think any act of resistance against the war in Iraq, however minimal, was important enough to take part in.

My generation’s literary stars have shown themselves to lack the spine and humanity of Pinter. Ian McKewan, Salman Rushdie, Christopher Hitchens, Martin Amis, have turned against humanity and lined their pockets with the proceeds of the dollars of the establishment. The few voices that are now speaking out and managing to be heard are risking the obloquy of the powerful. Figures like Naomi Klein, Arundhati Roy, John Pilger, Noam Chomsky, Howard Zinn, must now be added to by a new generation of voices passionate in their denunciation of oppression.

***
Below is one of the poems that Pinter read at Peter Kennard’s show in July 2004:

American Football by Harold Pinter

Hallelujah!
It works.
We blew the shit out of them.

We blew the shit right back up their own ass
And out their fucking ears.

It works.
We blew the shit out of them.
They suffocated in their own shit!

Hallelujah.
Praise the Lord for all good things.

We blew them into fucking shit.
They are eating it.

Praise the Lord for all good things.

We blew their balls into shards of dust,
Into shards of fucking dust.

We did it.

Now I want you to come over here and kiss me on the mouth.

Very Sad
Saw the Nobel prize speech on the Tele,
was mesmerized by it.
Genius

“I’ve never been able to write a happy play. I’ve been able to enjoy a happy life.”

RIP

As the title suggests I'm looking for -

Peter Kennard: Haywain with cruise missiles



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