Peter Sedgley

Peter Sedgley (1930–2025) was a leading British exponent of Op Art and an important pioneer of kinetic and light-based art. Over a career spanning more than six decades, he explored the effects of colour, geometry, illumination and movement, creating paintings, light works and kinetic constructions in which apparently static forms seem to pulse, shift and expand before the eye.

Born in London, Sedgley initially trained in architecture and urban planning and had no formal art-school education. His decision to become a painter followed his meeting with Bridget Riley in 1961. The two shared a studio in Notting Hill and developed a close exchange of ideas; Sedgley’s architectural training and knowledge of geometry proved particularly important as both artists developed increasingly complex geometric compositions.

Sedgley’s first major solo exhibition, at McRoberts & Tunnard in London in 1965, was a success, with works acquired by Tate and the Arts Council of Great Britain. That same year he was included in The Responsive Eye at the Museum of Modern Art, New York, the landmark exhibition that brought Op Art to an international audience.

His early paintings frequently employed concentric circles and carefully controlled colour relationships to generate sensations of movement and optical instability. Around 1970 he began incorporating programmed coloured light into his work, extending these investigations beyond painting. Different sequences of illumination transformed the colours of the painted surface and created the impression that the image itself was moving.

One of the most important works from this period is Colour Cycle III (1970), acquired by Tate in the year it was made. It was displayed at Tate Modern in 2018–19 as part of the museum’s Start Display, where its changing sequences of coloured light attracted considerable public attention and it became one of Tate Modern’s most Instagrammed works at the time.

In 1968 Sedgley, Riley and Peter Townsend founded SPACE, transforming disused industrial buildings into affordable studios for artists and establishing a model that had a lasting influence on artists’ studio provision in London. The same year, The Redfern Gallery first showed Sedgley’s work, beginning an association that would continue across more than half a century. He later returned to the gallery for further exhibitions, including solo shows in 1983 and 2009.

Sedgley moved to Berlin in 1971, where he lived and worked for much of the following half-century, continuing to develop increasingly ambitious light and kinetic works.

His work received considerable international recognition. Later exhibitions included Art & the Sixties: This Was Tomorrow at Tate Britain in 2004; Traces du Sacré at the Centre Pompidou, Paris, in 2008; Dynamo: A Century of Light and Movement in Art 1913–2013 at the Grand Palais, Paris, in 2013; Electronic Superhighway at the Whitechapel Gallery in 2016; and Action–Reaction: 100 Years of Kinetic Art at Kunsthal Rotterdam in 2018.

Renewed international interest in light and kinetic art brought Sedgley’s work to a new generation of viewers. Colour Cycle III was included in Tate’s touring exhibition Light: Works from Tate’s Collection, shown internationally in Australia, China, South Korea and Japan between 2021 and 2023.

In 2024 The Redfern Gallery presented Peter Sedgley: 5 Decades, the most extensive retrospective survey of his work to have been mounted in London. Conceived in dialogue with Sedgley and curator Omar Kholeif, the exhibition brought together paintings, works on paper, light pieces and kinetic works spanning five decades. It proved to be the last major exhibition in which Sedgley participated during his lifetime.

Peter Sedgley died in March 2025 at the age of ninety-four. His work is held in major public collections in Britain and internationally, including Tate, the Victoria and Albert Museum, the Arts Council Collection, the Government Art Collection and the Berlinische Galerie.

The Estate of Peter Sedgley is represented by The Redfern Gallery.