An Enduring Vision: A Forty-Six-Year Conversation

An exhibition of new works by Sir Peter Blake is always a significant event. An exhibition that presents a period of such productive and profound creativity from an artist entering his tenth decade is reason enough to celebrate. But when that exhibition also continues a dialogue between artist and gallery that stretches back more than four decades, it becomes a moment of rare historical resonance.

Wetterling Gallery, founded in Gothenburg in 1978, has maintained a long-standing relationship with Peter Blake, presenting his work in Scandinavia over many years and in many contexts. To encounter Blake then was to witness an artist at a turning point: approaching the end of his deep engagement with the Brotherhood of Ruralists — rooted in English folklore, landscape, and a more traditional painterly aesthetic — and on the threshold of re-engaging with the vibrant, popular visual language of Pop Art that he had helped to shape. To present him now is to witness the spectacular culmination of that evolution: a career not winding down, but spiralling outward with astonishing energy.

Blake has likened his career to a theatrical play: Pop Art as the first act, his retrospective at Tate in 1983 as the second, and his residency at the National Gallery (1994–96) as the third. The steady flow of work since then, he suggests, constitutes the encore — a sustained period of renewal and reinvention that confirms his undiminished creative vitality.

Peter Blake’s art-historical significance

Sir Peter Blake (b. 1932) occupies a central position in post-war British art. As one of the founders of British Pop Art, he helped redefine the relationship between high culture and popular imagery in the 1950s and 1960s. Alongside contemporaries such as Richard Hamilton, Eduardo Paolozzi, and Pauline Boty, Blake transformed the detritus of consumer culture — comic strips, advertising, pop music — into material for fine art.

His paintings, collages, and relief constructions bridge a sensitivity to traditional craftsmanship with the immediacy of mass communication. Works such as On the Balcony (1955–57, Tate) and the cover design for The Beatles’ Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band (1967) have become touchstones of visual culture, embodying Pop Art’s playful yet sharply observant intelligence.

Beyond the exuberance of Pop Art, Blake’s work is sustained by a distinct English lyricism and humanism. His subjects — circus performers, wrestlers, childhood icons, and celebrities — reflect both affection and critical distance. Over seven decades, his practice has remained remarkably consistent in its conviction that popular imagery can convey universal emotions, and that collecting, ordering, and assembling are methods as valid as painting from life.

Through his influence as a teacher, mentor, and collaborator, Blake has profoundly shaped subsequent generations of artists working with collage, assemblage, and popular iconography. His career stands as a living bridge between mid-twentieth-century modernism and the pluralistic visual languages of contemporary art.

The intimate gaze: Girl with a Disney Tattoo — Portraits (2020–2023)

The exhibition opens with works that are at once traditional and radical, intimate and iconic. The late portraits in the Girl with a Disney Tattoo series (2020–2023) are small oil paintings on canvas mounted on panel or on panel alone. Many were made in London during the 2020 lockdown — a moment of global isolation echoed in their tightly cropped, focused compositions. Scale has long fascinated Blake — an avid collector of toys and small curios — who routinely challenges himself to paint as small as possible. These diminutive formats enforce intimacy, drawing the viewer into a close encounter that rewards careful scrutiny.

The faces are imaginary, constructed from Blake’s vast archive of found images — an eye from one source, a mouth from another — creating visages that feel familiar yet entirely new. The result is a form of “painted collage,” aligning the portraits with the method that has defined his practice for seven decades. They are not portraits of individuals, but assemblages of countless fragments, testifying to Blake’s enduring fascination with people, their personalities, and their idiosyncrasies.

The decisive conceptual gesture is the mischievous addition of a Disney character tattoo, delicately painted onto the sitter’s face or neck — a distinctly Pop intervention into the classical portrait. Tattoos, a recurring motif in Blake’s work, echo his interest in circus and fairground worlds where the body becomes a canvas. A tattoo is permanent, personal, and often subversive. Disney, by contrast, is a global shorthand for childhood, innocence, and manufactured fantasy. By pairing these symbols — the self-declared mark and the mass-produced icon — Blake creates an image poised between tenderness and ambivalence. The portraits’ intimacy makes the question personal, inviting viewers to reflect on the indelible marks popular culture has left on their own identities.

Resonances with the Renaissance: technique and the persistence of craft

To understand the quiet intensity of Blake’s painting, it is illuminating to compare his method to the Italian and Flemish Renaissance masters he so deeply admires. Like painters of that era — van Eyck, Memling, Bellini — Blake approaches oil paint as a medium of precision, luminosity, and reverence. His surfaces are built slowly through transparent layers and glazes, achieving a clarity and radiance reminiscent of early panel painting’s devotional intimacy.

The small scale of the Disney Tattoo portraits reinforces this kinship. Just as fifteenth-century artists created compact Madonnas for private contemplation, Blake constructs intimate images that reward close, meditative viewing. Where Renaissance saints bore halos, Blake’s model bears a Disney tattoo: the sacred replaced by the secular, yet the image’s devotional function — its capacity to focus attention — remains intact.

Equally Renaissance-like is Blake’s command of symbolic detail. Every element, however playful, is deliberate. The tattoo functions as an emblem in a Flemish allegory: a compact image carrying moral, social, and psychological meaning. His Pop icons perform the same role once played by religious or mythological symbols — markers of shared culture and belief.

Finally, Blake’s compositional order reveals a Renaissance sense of harmony beneath the apparent collage. Even in the most complex image, he achieves a balance and geometry reminiscent of Piero della Francesca or Raphael. The effect is a paradoxical blend of stillness and wit: a Pop artist working with the patience, control, and moral clarity of a master from another century.

Seen in this light, Blake’s late portraits are not ironic pastiches but a contemporary continuation of a much older tradition — the belief that meticulous craftsmanship and symbolic imagination can still illuminate the human condition.

The world on the cutting-room floor: collage as method and metaphor

Moving from painted collage to paper collage represents a shift of medium, not of theme. For Blake, collage is a worldview — a way of collecting, sorting, and recontextualising the visual detritus of modern life to generate new meanings. It places him in the lineage of pioneers such as Kurt Schwitters and contemporaries like Robert Rauschenberg. From early touchstones such as Locker (1959) — an old RAF locker covered with pin-up images and an early expression of British Pop — to the intricate compositions presented here, the logic remains consistent. These collages are the natural result of a collector’s eye, a mind that sees the world as a vast cutting-room floor filled with fragments awaiting new life.

Dialogues across time I: remixing Hogarth’s London (2023–2024)

In the Hogarth series, Blake initiates a witty conversation with a significant predecessor. William Hogarth (1697–1764) created “modern moral subjects” — narrative scenes such as A Harlot’s Progress and Gin Lane that satirised the vices of eighteenth-century London. As a painter and printmaker who used a popular medium to speak to his time, Hogarth can be seen as a proto-Pop figure.

Blake layers reproductions of Hogarth’s engravings with the bold iconography of twentieth-century Pop: comic-strip exclamations, cartoon characters, assertive typography. In Hogarth. Time Smoking a Picture (2024), satire collides with a frenetic “WHAM” and a guitar-playing Donald Duck. Colour thrusts the past into the present: bold accents of green, yellow, red, and electric blue slice through the blackness of the print.

Blake’s dialogue with Hogarth ultimately argues for continuity — the persistence of visual satire across centuries. His collages reveal the deep kinship between the engraved dramas of Georgian London and the bold semiotics of modern media.

Dialogues across time II: archives of wonder (2023)

Two further collage series explore how knowledge, storytelling, and nostalgia are constructed and transmitted. The Larousse works mine material from a nineteenth-century illustrated encyclopaedia, undermining its ordered hierarchies. In Larousse & Sears, Roebuck. Collections (2023), dignitaries and ethnographic subjects recede behind a democratic array of toys and consumer goods. The Big Little Books series draws on inexpensive mid-twentieth-century children’s books, arranging recurring images — heroes, cowboys, pulp adventurers — into visual taxonomies that expose the formulas of popular narrative.

By presenting these series together, Blake conducts a brilliant comparative study of visual archives. Through the democratic logic of collage, he levels distinctions between “high” and “low,” demonstrating that a comic-strip vignette can possess the same formal power and emotional resonance as a canonical print or a scientific illustration.

Conclusion: still cutting, still painting, still playing

From the composite faces of the lockdown portraits to the layered histories of the collages, this exhibition affirms an artist whose method and philosophy remain powerfully consistent. Collage — thoughtful, witty, and playful reassembly — is the unifying logic. Peter Blake’s career is a lifelong project of seeing, collecting, and rearranging — of finding wonder in the overlooked and forging resonant connections between fragments of shared culture.

His late-career “encore” is not a quiet repetition of former glories but a dynamic and exhilarating expansion of them. It reveals an artist who, at over ninety years of age, has lost none of his curiosity, technical skill, or humour — an artist whose practice continues to affirm that art, in the moment of its making, remains eternally new.

— Edvard Thordén