Peter Davies (B. 1970)

From ‘Hot 100’ charts listing favourite artists to busy abstractions and baffling flow charts, Peter Davies’ playful work exhibits a distinctively vibrant and colourful style of contemporary conceptual art. Combining text with formalism, and painting on a monumental scale with a striking technicolour palette, Davies establishes a mode of conceptualism that is immediately engrossing and entertaining. Taking the form of a colossal and flummoxing flow chart, Fun With the Animals: Joseph Beuys Text Painting (1998) links Joseph Beuys to a multitude of other artists via an illegible network of buzzwords and phrases. ‘It requires the complicated linear thinking of a late-night drinking game’, Patricia Ellis has noted, but ‘Davies [also] presents an art history on a functional level: it’s about as close to science as it gets.’