Peter Saville
Creative Director for the City of Manchester
Born in Manchester, 1955. Lives and works in London.
Peter Saville is an artist and designer whose contribution to culture has been unique.
As the art director and co-founder of Factory Records he accessed a mass audience through the sub-cultures of pop music, best exemplified in the series of record sleeve artworks he created for Joy Division and New Order between 1979 and 1993. He cites Factory’s idealism, rather than any commercial objective that allowed him, and other influential Factory artists to communicate ideas, aesthetics and ultimately values to a formative audience.
Despite personal misgivings about categorisation, recent curatorial thought denotes Saville’s practice as ‘social sculpture’ – where the artist operates through a variety of channels to make interventions that facilitate our understanding of the resonance of how and where things are said as being equally important as what is said.
Through the medium of design and art direction, Saville created iconic work in music, culture and fashion. He is now politically engaged as consultant ‘Creative Director’ to the City of Manchester. Where since 2004, he has played a leading strategic role in the economic regeneration and cultural renaissance of his home city.
This cross-disciplinary approach allowed his work to be seen and made available in contexts outside of the conventional gallery space.
His achievements were celebrated in The Peter Saville Show at the Design Museum in London in 2003, the exhibition then travelled to Tokyo and Manchester. His first major show in a contemporary art museum was at the Migros Museum in Zurich in 2005.
Alongside artist and collaborator Anna Blessmann, he recently exhibited the first stage in a new series of ongoing art works, entitled the Swing Project.
Swing Project 1 took place at the FRAC Champagne-Ardenne, in Reims, 2010.
This year his work will be featured in ‘Postmodernism: Style and Subversion 1970 – 1990’, at the V&A, London, from 24 September 2011.
Monographs: ‘Designed by Peter Saville’ published by Frieze, 2003
‘Peter Saville Estate’ published by J.R.P Ringier, 2007