Guy Peppin was born in Sydney in 1980. On completing high school, Guy worked as a graphic designer and collaborated with the Molotov Guerrilla Art Collective. After traveling to Italy and seeing the work of artists like Cy Twombly, Guy returned to university and enrolled at the National Art School, Sydney. He successfully finished his undergraduate study of drawing, printmaking and history Guy was invited to do Honours Drawing. During his Honours year, Guy’s work shifted into abstraction, dispensing with pictorial modes of representation. His work now deals with ideas of diffusion, erasure and memory.
Guy began exhibiting in group exhibitions internationally in 2003, with work in ICOGRADA Galleria, Québec, Canada. Follwing this, Peppin exhibited regularly in overseas galleries including; Group Showing, Speakeasy Artist Space, Hong Kong (2007), The Capitals Project, Han Jun Arts Center, Seoul, South Korea (2007) and International Show, Xanadu Gallery, Mongolia (2007). He held his first solo exhibition, Return to Sender, at Liverpool Street Gallery, Sydney (2009). He continued with a second solo exhibition, Voyager, Liverpool Street Gallery, Sydney in 2011.
Guy Peppin’s work expresses deep emotions through simple forms or colour ‘poems’ that take us beyond everyday life. He sees his work as an invitation to a conversation – a dialogue through colours and line. The work is beautiful, not relatively, but naturally and absolutely. He deals with the play of a traditional and rational grid structure against imaginative colour and unskilled craft, the classical dialectic in the history of thought. Using a grid he is developing a practice of studying the constant effects of permanence eroded by change, time and decay.
“My work has become a compression of form, edge, weight and colour. The verging strips of canvas have become more physical and more hones; geometry and colour have become more intense, with torn nervous edges. My work now concentrates on making without being ritualistic and connecting to materials without fetishising them. Within this process randomness, arbitrary relationships and automatism are at work.
Having come from a background that is embracing of technology, I see making art in this manner as a personal antidote to the increasingly depersonalising nature of contemporary society. I love technology, but the flatter and more seductive the digital screen, the more I want to make human, natural surfaces; I want to make art that is infused with joy, delicacy, texture, vigour and power.“
Peppin has participated in numerous group exhibitions, awards and prizes in Australia including; Molotov Guerrilla Art Collective, Unsolicited venues in London and Sydney (1998), DIGIT International Poster Competition, Sydney (2003), Pyrmont Art Prize, Tap Gallery, Sydney (2008) and Summer Exhibition, Liverpool Street Gallery, Sydney (2009). Peppin was a finalist in the RBS Emerging Artist Award in 2009 and again in 2010. He recently received the Storrier Onslow Cite Internationale des Arts Paris Studio Residency courtesy of the Friends of the National Art School.
Guy Peppin’s works are represented in private collections in Australasia and the United States of America. He lives and works in Sydney.
- Writers:
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- Date written:
- 2012
- Last updated:
- 2012
