The Call

London-based artist Peter Peri draws inspiration from European Modernism, literature and popular science fiction, creating pared-down geometric compositions that seem to conjure other worlds. His grandfather Laszlo Péri was a well-known Constructivist who emigrated from Hungary to Britain. Included in the Saatchi Gallery’s 2009 exhibition Newspeak: British Art Now at the State Hermitage Museum, St Petersburg, The Call (2005) is an early example of his practice. ‘The title is from H.P. Lovecraft’s Call of Cthulhu’, Peri explains. ‘I thought that the two circles had the look of sound waves, so this painting became about a relationship between a sound and a moment of visual appearance or birth. Lovecraft’s personal take on Futurism was a horrified one (in his story the call summons up a monstrous 4th dimensional creature and city) and I’m interested in that abyssal aspect of Modernism as a movement of new beginnings, its unfamiliarity, and the violence involved in the idea of abstraction.’ Peri’s work is held in institutions including Tate, London and the Kunsthalle Basel, where he has also mounted solo exhibitions.