Peter Blake at Pitzhanger: Inside the Architecture of Pop

Few artists have shaped the visual language of modern Britain as decisively as Sir Peter Blake. With Peter Blake: In the Studio, opening at Pitzhanger Manor & Gallery in November 2026, the focus shifts from the finished image to the conditions that produced it.

Spanning more than seven decades, Blake’s career has defined British Pop Art through an instinctive fusion of high and low culture. From painting and collage to printmaking and album design, his work has consistently drawn on the visual noise of everyday life, reframing it with clarity and affection. Yet this exhibition proposes something more intimate. It reconstructs the studio itself as both subject and method.

At the centre of the show is a full-scale recreation of Blake’s working environment. Not a theatrical approximation, but a spatial translation of how the artist has lived with images. Objects, memorabilia, ephemera, fragments of popular culture these are not peripheral influences, but core components of his practice. The studio becomes an archive of attention, where collecting and making collapse into a single act.

This emphasis on process reframes Blake’s legacy. While he is often associated with iconic works such as the cover for Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band, created alongside Jann Haworth, the exhibition resists reducing his career to singular moments. Instead, it presents continuity. A sustained engagement with imagery, memory, and cultural identity that extends from the early 1960s to the present.

Blake’s emergence during the “Swinging Sixties,” alongside figures such as David Hockney, positioned him at the centre of a cultural shift in which art absorbed the language of mass media. His appearance in Pop Goes the Easel brought this new sensibility into public view, collapsing the distance between artist and audience.

At Pitzhanger, this history is placed in dialogue with place. Blake’s long-standing connection to West London becomes a narrative thread, linking his studio practice to a wider cultural landscape shaped by music, film, and subculture. References to local institutions, from Ealing Studios to early performance venues associated with bands like The Rolling Stones and The Who, position his work within a broader ecosystem of influence.

The exhibition also extends further back, drawing connections to William Hogarth. Blake’s collages inspired by Gin Lane and Marriage A-la-Mode are presented within the historic rooms of Pitzhanger, a house originally designed by Sir John Soane. This layering of references collapses centuries of British visual culture into a single space, suggesting continuity rather than rupture between past and present.

What emerges is a portrait of Blake not only as an artist, but as a cultural reader. His work absorbs, rearranges, and re-presents the images that define a society. The studio, in this context, is not a private retreat but a site of accumulation, where meaning is constructed through proximity and juxtaposition.

Curated by Jake Twyford and Louise Shorr, the exhibition does not attempt to monumentalise Blake. Instead, it brings the viewer into his orbit. It shows how ideas are formed, how influences are held, and how a lifetime of looking becomes a practice of making.

At Pitzhanger, the studio is no longer hidden. It becomes the work itself.