John Peter Askew

“Imagine, for a moment, a Cézanne who, rather than attempting to picture the structure of Mont Saint-Victoire and of every part of the natural world through “the geometric forms: the cone, the cube, the cylinder, and the sphere”, instead attempted to picture it through the idea and form of fire (Cézanne 1904). Imagine that in this alternate universe Cézanne took the idea of picturing the world in terms of the structure of fire, where all matter was energy, all energy was active, and all activity was a transferral of energy, both physical energy and psychic energy. This is not such a counter-intuitive proposition as it may first seem, in relation to John Peter Askew’s quarter-century long project to capture the intimate lives of a single family in Perm, Russia, and to think about our collective direction through the twenty-first century so far. Indeed Askew has predecessors in this regard even in the recent history of British art: Derek Jarman referred to his art ‘as [a] poetry of fire … luminous and oblique’. Askew’s work is, as both Cezanne’s and Jarman’s are, luminous in both the literal and metaphorical senses.” Alistair Robinson

WE II, a companion volume to WE, is a timely voice of humanity, celebrating friendship, communality and kindness.

352 pages

158 colour plates

Texts Alistair Robinson and Lee Maelzer

Published by Kerber Verlag, Berlin 2022, supported by the Northern Gallery for Contemporary Art and launched at the Photographer’s Gallery, London