John Wesley
Peter Blake
Peter Blake / John Wesley: Drawings
Fredericks & Freiser is pleased to announce an exhibition of drawings by Peter Blake and John Wesley. For both artists, tracing functions as a foundational part of their methodology--a translation device that allows everyday imagery to be transcribed into their own aesthetic vocabularies. As predecessors to the Pop movement, Blake and Wesley looked to advertisements, tattoos, cartoons, and typographical design to transform the mundane into something fantastical and to record the social preoccupations of their time.
This initial process becomes a means of selection: it shapes what is appropriated and determines the qualities of the final work. Blake’s tracings are dense and intricate, his fine line enabling a buildup of detail that later animates his completed paintings. Wesley, by contrast, strips popular motifs down to their most essential contours--raw outlines placed over bare, evocative fields. Despite these differences, both artists share an interest in the intersection of pop culture and nostalgic folk art, using tracing to mediate between the inherited image and the invented one.
About the Artists
Peter Blake is often described, along with Richard Hamilton and Patrick Caulfield, as one of the godfathers of British Pop art. At the center of his work is a sustained fascination with popular culture and entertainment: music, film, sports, and celebrity. Perhaps best known for his 1967 album cover for Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, Blake channels the visual exuberance of mass culture into a distinct artistic lexicon. He has been the subject of numerous solo exhibitions, including major retrospectives at the Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam, and the Tate Gallery, London.
For over forty years, John Wesley (1928–2022) created an unrelenting and remarkably singular body of work whose subject is no less than the American psyche. While many artists of his generation used the popular image to comment on culture, Wesley employed a comic-strip style and a compositional rigor to create deeply personal, often hermetic paintings that touch on primal fear, joy, and desire. He has had more than sixty one-person exhibitions in the United States and Europe, including a major retrospective at Museum Haus Lange, Krefeld, and a permanent installation at the Chinati Foundation, Marfa, Texas.