Stephen Peirce (English, born 1965) graduated from the Royal Academy Schools and was awarded the Selina Geneviève Foundation Travel Award in 2002. He has exhibited widely, including at the Royal Academy of Arts and Bloomberg New Contemporaries, as well as in São Paulo, Santa Monica, London, Edinburgh, Basel, Leipzig, and Paris.
Peirce’s paintings depict unfamiliar worlds constructed from recognizable elements, yet they remain elusive and difficult to define. His work draws inspiration from the writings of J.G. Ballard, Aldous Huxley, and Haruki Murakami, as well as the films of Andrei Tarkovsky, still-life painting, astronomy, and growing scientific concern about the future of the planet. From these influences, Peirce imagines forms of life emerging within a post-apocalyptic landscape.
Out of the remnants of a post-human society, matter accumulates, evolves, and organizes itself into new structures. Initiated in 2002, this ongoing, almost demiurgic project presents works in which matter appears to gain awareness of its own existence and of the increasingly complex forms it assumes.
A central aspect of Peirce’s work is the tension between attraction and repulsion—the simultaneous seductiveness and abjection of his imagery. This duality, already evident in the works exhibited at the Royal Academy in 2002, reflects both our contemporary relationship to images and the fragile, often superficial nature of that engagement.
Peirce invites viewers to look beyond the surface, revealing both the allure of the image and the decay from which it is formed. By accumulating and structuring waste, he creates the illusion of a new kind of life—one devoid of humanity, yet evolving in intricate and unsettling ways.
Working in the tradition of the Old Masters, with a hyper realistic, almost three-dimensional technique, Stephen Peirce paints a future we might fear: one that warns of possible outcomes while revealing a strange and compelling beauty.