Peter Saville
Looks Like You’ve Reached the End (Found), 2022
2021
Lithographic Print
59 x 84cm
Edition 100, signed certificate
Best known for his iconic album cover designs, over the past four decades Peter Saville has consistently presented imagery that he feels resonates with the given moment. In relation to this work the artist explains that as his own sensibility was founded in the late analogue era, he often finds himself critically aware of the exponential momentum of digitisation – a process which he describes as ‘the atomisation of everything into disparate bytes of information, the endless permutations of which seem to negate seeing beyond the cloud itself’. A problem he articulates in this exclusive edition for the ICA with both image and title being derived from anomalous results of online searches.
Bio
Peter Saville. (Born 1955, Manchester). With a practice located between art and design, Peter Saville’s work merges aspects of both. This unparalleled approach has resulted in a unique contribution to culture. His hybrid position came into being partly through the unprecedented autonomy afforded to him, aged 22, as co-founder and art director of the legendary independent UK label Factory Records. Unlike most ‘commercial artists’ of the time and indeed since, Saville was free to design without approval. Making his art in the context of mass production, he accessed an audience through pop music, best exemplified in the series of record sleeves he created for Joy Division and New Order between 1979 and 1993.
His radical designs seemed to break all the rules, sometimes omitting information about artists or titles, or employing visual codes, fundamentally questioning modes of consumption and communication. He cites Factory’s idealism, rather than any commercial objective, which allowed him and other influential Factory artists to communicate ideas, aesthetics and ultimately values to a formative audience. Through the medium of design and art direction, Saville continued to create iconic work across music, fashion and culture.
His achievements were celebrated in The Peter Saville Show at the Design Museum in London in 2003. His first major show in a contemporary art museum was at the Migros Museum in Zurich in 2005, and he continues to exhibit internationally. His first monograph was published by Frieze in 2003. He is a Royal Designer for Industry (RDI) and won the London Design Medal in 2013. In 2020 he received the honour of Commander of the Order of the British Empire (CBE) in recognition of the positive impact of his work.
