John Berger, The Guardian
'Peter Kennard's work is haunting. Eschewing words, it insists upon not being forgotten. He is a master of the medium of photomontage. His images are impossible to convey with words because of their unmistakable visual texture, pure and dirty, suggesting a strange amalgam of X-ray, satellite image and slag. The future - which for so long was a mine of gory rhetoric for those holding power - today depends upon those who insist upon looking beyond their lifetime. And to do this we have to scrutinise, like Peter Kennard, our nightmares and suppressed hopes. His art cannot be ignored.
Banksy
‘I take my hat off to you Sir’
John Pilger, The Guardian
'In its form and power, Peter Kennard's art ranks among the most important of the late twentieth and early twenty-first century. It is important because it breaks the consensual silence surrounding the most urgent issue of the day. This is the war against humanity, waged by those charged with rehabilitating imperialism. His pictures brilliantly evoke the faces that cry out from the silent war. They are faces from a resistance that has yet to disturb the triumphal march but that will come. Peter Kennard has given us a brave and eloquent hint’.
Richard Slocombe, Imperial War Museum,
‘With a career spanning almost 50 years, Peter Kennard is without doubt Britain’s most important political artist and its leading practitioner of photomontage. His adoption of the medium in the late 1960s restored an association with radical politics, and drew inspiration from the anti-Nazi montages of John Heartfield in the 1930s. Many of Kennard’s images are now themselves icons of the medium, defining the tenor of protest in recent times and informing the visual culture of conflict and crisis in modern history.’
E.P Thompson
‘Shelley once wrote “We must imagine what we know”. The facts about nuclear war are now more readily available thanks to all the work of writers and researchers in the peace movement. But even these fall short of the full human truth which is not only about that terrible possible future, it is also about the hypocrisy and the evasion in the discourse of our own times – the great cover-up which is hiding this from the truth of our imagination now. It is only when a gifted artist such as Peter Kennard exposes this to full view that we are able to imagine what we know.’
Naomi Klein
‘Peter Kennard’s work is a harrowing x-ray of the shadow side of the world that perfectly captures the brutal asymmetries of our age: heavy weaponry trained on broken people, all-seeing technologies and disappearing identities, perpetually exhaling industry and an asphyxiating planet.’
Thom Yorke
‘This is what I thought when I saw your work: It is as if we have learnt nothing. They wrap themselves up in words like ‘freedom’ and ‘democracy’ and drape themselves in our flags with no concept of where these things have come from and what they really mean (hijacked for their own short- term political gain). History is endlessly doomed to repeat itself as the dead are forgotten and the past deteriorates beyond all recognition. We have forgotten how we got here’.
Laura Cumming, The Observer
There is a photomontage by the great political artist Peter Kennard that gets straight to the point. It shows a pair of elderly hands clutching a knife and fork in an attempt to cut a grimy coin on a plate of meagre pennies. The causal connections between hunger, poverty, debt, capital and survival are all fused in an instant, along with the pitiful conditions of old age. Once seen, the montage is hard to forget. Kennard never lets up – how could he (how could you?) when there is so much horror and injustice.
Few artists have done so much with the unique virtue of montage… art cannot change the world but while Kennard is still working, there is at least hope’.
Ken Livingstone
‘Peter Kennard is a revolutionary artist because he shows us what is really there, using with ease and force any medium necessary for his message’.
Harold Pinter
‘Kennard sees the skull beneath the skin all right: an area dominated by greed, indifference, ruthlessness, naked force against the powerless; the Holy Grail of the Big Buck. He weaves a brilliant and ghastly tapestry about power, desolation, destruction, death and ‘the market’. Kennard forces us to inhabit a grotesque and oppressive prison from which there is no escape. The prisoner is the human spirit, chained, shackled, wasted, reduced, throttled’.
Jarvis Cocker
‘Peter Kennard has been producing his politically radical photomontages for 50 years.
We need people who carry on fighting the good fight. People who keep their focus despite the changing cultural and political landscape. The message is consistent – the message is clear – the message is true. The message is uncompromising, brutal and hard-hitting – but also very beautiful, it’s beautiful because it wants to keep us alive. It’s a jolt of electricity. A shot in the arm. A kick up the backside. You know what? It’s a wake-up call’.
Sunday Times
‘The best exponent of the art of photomontage in Britain today’.
Waldemar Januszczak, The Guardian
‘Kennard is a no-nonsense political artist who proves again and again that the frightening image is just as mighty as the sword’.
Richard Cork
‘Kennard is under no illusion about what modern war means and he uses his trenchant skill as a political artist to drive its reality home… the finest photomontage artist in Britain today’.
John Roberts, Art in America
‘Kennard is one of the very few artists – the only one, it might be said – who has had a direct effect on recent British politics. His photomontages are everywhere’.
BBC website
‘Peter Kennard is a very unofficial war artist, his unique art on the subject of war is striking, creative and thought-provoking’.
Jonathan Jones, The Guardian
Peter Kennard is a living hero of pacifist photomontage,. Not only has Kennard been denouncing war for more than four decades but he does it using a style of photomontage directly descended from Hannah Hoch’s Cut With the Kitchen Knife Through the Last Weimar Beer-Belly cultural epoch of Germany and Heartfield’s
Adolph, the Superman, Swallows Gold and Spouts Crap. The beauty of traditional
scissors and glue photomontage is precisely that it doesn’t look real -it looks like art. This Brechtian quality of alienation makes it immediately recognisable as social comment or dark fantasy, rather than reportage. This richly subjective quality makes Peter Kennard a fascinating and important artist.