Peter Abrahams

Peter Abrahams

Peter Abrahams is a British visual artist based in London. He works with photographic media, painting and printmaking.

The still-life photographs are constructed in the studio and investigate properties and materials of common objects which have little conventional value. These objects are often sourced from charity shops or pound-stores so that their origins are either uncertain or they are the products of cheap labour.

The Active and Contemplative Life compositions are vertical diptychs which pair workers, often in the financial district of the City of London, with the overlooked spaces and substances of the urban environment. They are meditations on the status of work, on the hierarchy of people and spaces, and on the different speeds of visual perception. Through the doubling of the imagery, new critical interpretations are made possible and in the words of the anthropologist Christopher Pinney, the "series is constructed on the visual presence in their lower registers of an underneath".