Biography
Peter Sedgley (b. London, UK 1930) was a British Op and Kinetic artist who had no formal artistic training but studied at Brixton Technical School and until 1959 he worked as an assistant in various architectural practices. He then joined the RAF and was discharged in 1960. Sedgley began to paint in 1963, influenced by Bridget Riley, with whom in 1968 he and Peter Townsend set up SPACE (Space Provision, Artistic, Cultural and Educational), a scheme for providing studio space for young artists. He was included the exhibition The Responsive Eye at MoMA, New York in 1964 and was a prizewinner at the Tokyo Biennale in 1965 as well as having a solo exhibition at the McRoberts and Tunnard Gallery, London in the same year.
In 1967 he began to incorporate lights in his work, for example in his ‘video-rotors’—painted rotating discs on which a variety of electronically programmed light patterns were played. From about 1970 he experimented with combining sound with colour; often he works on a large scale, creating environments in which spectator movement triggers photoelectric cells, causing colours to change. Since the early 1970s Sedgley has lived mainly in Germany and has had many solo and group exhibitions throughout the world, including a rertrospective at The Redfern Gallery in 2009.
