Kate MacGarry is pleased to announce a solo exhibition of new works by Peter McDonald.
Peter McDonald was born in Tokyo, Japan in 1973 and currently lives and works between London and Tokyo. McDonald’s paintings examine intricate aspects of human behaviour, gradually compiling an encyclopaedia of images and scenarios. His use of intense colour and universal subject matter describes a realm which balances lucid realism with vivid distortions, filled with references to modern life such as shopping, exercising and socialising in cafés. His pictures investigate pictorial space by playfully exploring perspective and form. This heightened sense of reality becomes a means through which the artist articulates experience and meaning.
Recent solo exhibitions include Cocktails, Gallery Side 2, Tokyo (2024); Kate MacGarry, London (2021); Sampo, Gallery Side 2 / void+, Tokyo (2021); This, that and the other, Dio Horia, Greece (2018); Winnebago, Carpets, Onsen, Potter, Daiwa Foundation, London (2013) and Visitor, the culmination of a year-long residency at the 21st Century Museum of Contemporary Art, Kanazawa, Japan (2011-12).
Group exhibitions include Ukiyo-e In Play, Tokyo National Museum (2025); 100 Hooks, Blunk Space, Point Reyes, CA, USA (2023); Weightless, Mieke Van Schaijk, The Netherlands (2019); Museum of Together, Spiral Building, Tokyo (2017); Roppongi Art Night, Mori Art Museum, Tokyo (2016) and Making & Unmaking, Camden Arts Centre, London (2016).
McDonald was awarded the Lucid Art Residency at Gordon Onslow Ford House, California in 2025. He was appointed a short-term Visiting Fellow at Jesus College, Oxford in 2022, and previously held a fellowship at the British School at Rome in 2017. In 2008, he received the John Moores Painting Prize, followed by a commission from London Underground in 2009 to produce Art for Everybody, a large-scale billboard installation at Southwark Station.
