| ARTIST BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH: | Born in Surrey, England, sculptor Peter Hide holds the reputation of being one of the planet’s leading practitioners of welded-steel sculpture. “I’m at my best when I’m making pieces that have … compression,” he says. Despite being an internationally-renowned monumentalist, Hide argues that his voice “comes in more clearly, more personal in these smaller works. Making a smaller piece can be more powerful because its power is more metaphoric, less literally monumental.”
After training at the Croydon College of Art in London, UK (1961 – 1964) and undertaking post-graduate studies at Saint Martins School of Art also in London (1964 – 1967), Hide organised annual exhibitions at the Stockwell Depot artist studios in London on behalf of the Arts Council of Great Britain from 1967 onward through the 1970s. He taught at the Norwich School of Art in Norwich, UK and developed its sculpture department towards successful application for diploma status (1968 – 1974), before returning to the Saint Martins School of Art to teach (1971 – 1978). He immigrated to Canada in 1977, securing a long-term teaching position at the University of Alberta. He participated in numerous workshops, including the Commonwealth Sculpture Symposium in Edmonton, the Triangle Workshop in Barcelona, and the Ironbridge Cast Iron Workshop in Shropshire, England.
Hide has mounted dozens of solo exhibitions, including at the Serpentine Gallery in London, the ten-year retrospective Peter Hide in Canada at the Edmonton Art Gallery, and at the Andre Emmerich Gallery in New York. He has also participated in scores of group exhibitions including Prospect 68 in Dusseldorf, Eight Sculptors which toured Alberta and Saskatchewan, and 4th Triangle Workshop in Pine Plains, New York. His work dwells in more than thirty public collections around the world, including those of Simon Fraser University in Vancouver, BC, the Museum of Modern Art in Barcelona Spain, and the Foundation of Kajikawa in Kyoto, Japan. His commissions and awards include a Canada Council A Grant, a piece for the exterior of the Winspear Centre for Music in Edmonton, and a monument for the United Kingdom Sculpture Garden at Goodwood in Sussex, England. |