Output details

'Looking Back: Facing Forward: Mistakes and Metaphors'Exhibition Catalogue Pete Clarke Victoria Gallery and Museum, University of Liverpool Gallery.

Looking Back, Facing Forward is Clarke’s representation of the changing city as a political metaphor for concepts of modernity and history utilising painting, printmaking, photography, poetic text and drawing.

Clark charts the impact of global capitalism on a city through his visual critique of Liverpool’s changing identity as a wealthy trading city, though intense periods of poverty, until policies of managed decline culminate in its regeneration as a European Cultural Capital.

Curated by Matthew Clough (Director of the Victoria Gallery and Museum, University of Liverpool), this exhibition was a critical overview of significant works by Clarke: building upon both past works and recent paintings -including works produced for Sheffield City Art Gallery from the collections of the Arts Council and University of Liverpool.

The exhibition catalogue featuring critical contextual essays by Matthew Clough and Moira Lindsay (Victoria Gallery and Museum), Bryan Biggs (Artistic Director the Bluecoat, Liverpool) and a recorded conversation between the Clarke and Gabriel Gee (Groupe d'études Interdisciplinaires en Arts Britanniques, Paris).

The exhibition and contextual publication was a platform for critical discussion and public seminars about the changing face of the city of Liverpool in terms of its social, political and cultural history and how contemporary art can contribute to a public understanding of social issues and debates. It profiled this Liverpool artist as a platform for contextual discussion in relation to 'Centre of the Creative Universe: Liverpool and the Avant Garde' (Tate Gallery Exhibition, 2007) edited by Christoph Grunenberg & Robert Knifton featuring Clarke's paintings in Cologne. ‘Art in a City Revisited’ also featured Clarke’s work, was edited by Bryan Biggs and Julie Sheldon, published by the Bluecoat and Liverpool University Press (2009), and looks at Liverpool 40 years on from John Willett’s seminal study ‘Art in a City’.