Peter Kennard: Archive of Dissent – ‘striking’ political photomontages

Since the 1970s, the British artist Peter Kennard has been creating striking photo-collages that are designed to speak “truth to power”, said Sarah Kent on The Arts Desk. Using simple materials – for some of his best-known pieces he used little more than a pair of scissors and some carefully chosen images culled from newspapers – he has repeatedly “gone on the attack to reveal the hypocrisy of politicians, his revulsion at war and the insanity of the arms race and, more recently, the ruthless exploitation of the planet’s resources”.

His work has been displayed everywhere from protest banners to the pages of newspapers, and has given activist groups such as the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament, and the anti-Apartheid movement, the “visual equivalent of marching songs”. Many of his collages – such as his striking variation on John Constable’s painting “The Hay Wain”, in which the cart bristles with cruise missiles – have become icons of modern protest art. This exhibition serves as a career retrospective, celebrating half-a- century of Kennard’s angry and often powerful work.