Peter Newman

Peter Newman was born in London in 1969 and attended Goldsmith's College, University of London, from 1987 to 1990. Over the past decade, since graduating, he has had solo shows in London, New York, Hamburg and Brussels and his work has also been exhibited as far afield as Kanazawa in Japan and San Giovanni Valdarno in Italy. In 1999 he was awarded the Mark Rothko Travel Scholarship.

Newman has made paintings, photographic and video installation and objects which explore how human beings 'grasp external space through bodily situation'. Newman argues that 'a corporeal or postural schema gives us at every moment a global, practical and implicit notion of the relation between our body and things'. Sometimes he has wrestled with an almost cosmic dimension using images that convey the sensation of surfing or sky-diving, experiences which are in many ways akin to the contemporary Sublime. Recently, he has begun to focus on the scale of the human body more explicitly by taking Le Corbusier's iconic LC4 chaise longue as the basis for a large piece of public sculpture. Sky Station takes the contours of Corbusier's design classic, themselves molded from the reclining human figure, and draws them out into the round, creating a 360 degree chaise longue which would be sited outside and encourage the contemplation of the vast expanse of space above and beyond.

Peter Newman's sculpture is contemplative and with a strong physical presence; it examines the Utopian values of Modernist art but also has a transcendental quality to it, not to mention the artist's acute creative intelligence for which, as his work often makes explicit, the sky seems to be the limit.