Peter McDonald: Teaching, Airport, Hair Salon, Bakery, Snooker

by Peter McDonald (Artist), Kate Macgarry

This first monograph introduces the bright, cartoony figurative painting of the Tokyo-born, London-based artist Peter McDonald. Designed to resemble a children's picture book, this text-free volume delivers a colorful world inhabited by people engaged in everyday activities--teaching, relaxing, making bread, holding hands, buying wool, dressing hair. McDonald's figures are constructed with an elementary graphic language. They have a cartoon-like simplicity and waver at the point where figuration might tip at any moment into abstraction. Human forms veer towards the circles stand in for heads, flat planes describe rooms and crude poses denote narrative. Yet these simplifications appear to create a community of super-humans living in a world that has a harmonious transparency. McDonald is represented in London by Kate MacGarry gallery.

92 pages, Hardcover

First published August 1, 2008