The British artist Peter Blake is enjoying a productive “late period”, completing half of the works in his latest solo show in the first eight months of this year. Among them is Elvis Shrine: Portraits, Landscapes or Still Lifes? (1985-2015), featuring objects and paintings of the King of Rock and Roll that the artist has collected for decades. Completed in August, it is the largest work in Peter Blake: Portraits and People at Waddington Custot Galleries in London (until 30 January).
The art historian and curator Marco Livingstone writes in an essay accompanying the show that Blake bought the Elvis portraits in downtown Los Angeles’s Olvera Street market. They are called “Mexican Elvises”, the artist told him, as Mexican painters “always make something crooked” about the singer who reportedly said Mexican women were ugly (something Presley denied). Other portraits include male and female wrestlers, tattooed figures and a world-weary clown. “It is an incredibly strong body of work for an artist in his 80s,” Livingstone says.
