Florence Peake's 'Factual Actual Release' series acquired for Norwich Castle Museum & Art Gallery

Florence Peake explores the intrinsic connection between the body and materiality. Her work incorporates performance and material-based mediums such as painting and sculpture in a reciprocal nature, using one to leverage and inform the other. By foregrounding the typically concealed processes of art creation, Peake orchestrates performances that encourage chaotic relationships between body and material, generating the foundation of her paintings and drawings. Through this symbiotic relationship, Peake accentuates the disparity between the outcome and the process, presenting the contrast between represented reality and the tactile, felt experience. Her work underscores how we perceive something versus its intrinsic nature, calling attention to the disconnect between experiential reality and objective reality. 

The series Factual Actual captures the contrast of the imagined body with its objective form. Consisting of small- to large-scale paintings, drawings and performances, the works are induced by the bodily sensations of having multiple limbs, many breasts and multiple genders layering over each other. Peake's making process starts with lying on the paper and making around her body, drawing around it as she moves, immortalising both the physical and embodied traces she creates. In addition to these corporeal sensations, Factual Actual also responds to grief, loneliness and the bodily sensations of troubled times. Factual Actual Release 7 showcases a definitive outline of a face – a rare occurrence among Peake's paintings that suitably marks the end of the Factual Actual series. Meanwhile, Factual Actual Performance Documentation 9 and 10 are small-scale paintings documenting Peake's Factual Actual: Ensemble performed at Southwark Park Galleries in 2023, a multilayered, performative, queer Gesamtkunstwerk.

Norwich Castle Museum & Art Gallery has acquired numerous figurative works over the last ten years. Peake's practice sits in this trajectory, with a particular focus on movement and the body. The works also relate to a broader collection focusing on performance and choreography, forming the centrepiece for a new collection display in Norwich Castle's modern and contemporary art gallery from January 2024.

Florence Peake (b.1973, London, UK) lives and works in London. Recent solo shows include Towner Eastbourne (2024), Southwark Park Galleries, London; Richard Saltoun Gallery, London (both 2023); z20 Gallery, Rome (2021); CentroCentro, Madrid; and Bosse & Baum, London (both 2019). Recent group exhibitions include Royal Albert Memorial Museum (RAMM), Exeter (2023); GIANT, Bournemouth (2022); and Gallery of Modern and Contemporary Art (GAMeC), Bergamo (2019-2019).

Presented by the Contemporary Art Society with support from the Norfolk Contemporary Art Society, 2023/2024.