Stephen Peirce

A graduate of the Royal Academy Schools and winner of the Selina Genevière Foundation Travel Award in 2002, Stephen Peirce has exhibited at the Royal Academy of Art, Bloomberg New Contemporaries, Sao Paulo, Santa Monica, London, Edinburgh, Basel, Leipzig, Paris...

The paintings of Stephen Peirce describes unknown worlds of familiar elements but in the same time indefinable. Inspired by the writings of Ballard, Huxley and Murakami, the films of Tarkovsky, still life painting, astronomy and the concern of the scientific community about the future of the planet, Peirce imagines life in a post-apocalyptic chaos. From the waste of a post-human society, matter accumulates, develops and organises itself into new forms.

Initiated in 2002, the demiurgic project of the artist shows works in which matter gradually becomes aware of its existence and of the increasingly complex forms it takes. The contrast of appearance - the simultaneously seductive and abject nature of the imagery - already so visible in the paintings exhibited at the Royal Academy in 2002, is very important to the artist. It is both an echo of our current relationship with the image and things in general, and the challenge of this ephemeral relationship based on sensational. Peirce invites us to discover the scene and its reverse.

The seductive image and the rot it is composed of. But the artist does not stop with this ambiguity. In accumulating waste by organizing it, he leads to the illusion of another life. A life devoid of any humanity and which evolution he describes in all its aspects. In the tradition of the masters of the past, with a hyperrealistic - almost 3D - touch, Stephen Peirce paints a future that we do not want, warns us of its probable fatality and imagines its strange beauty. Virtuoso and enigmatic.