by When the Pimlico Underground Station opened in September 1972, this caused a sensation in the London art world. The new Victoria line, for which it was a late addition, should present British design. Stations would be identified by tiled recesses behind benches along their platforms: artists like Edward Bawden were invited to do them. Pimlico was a special prize, the stop for the Tate gallery at the time, now Tate Britain. The Commission for her tiles went to Peter Sedgley, who died at the age of 94.
Sedgley seemed to be a strange choice. In 1972 he was at the height of his examination of OP art. In short for “optical”, a term that was shaped by the magazine magazine in 1964, the goal was to realize the eye; Hardly the ideal family tree for the design of what was essentially the location name. However, the Pimlico tiles turned out to be calming. Each of the 150 squares in Sedgley’s niches wore a yellow pane that was smaller and pale in the direction of the middle, darker and larger towards the edge. They are still used after half a century.
Sedgley’s role as an OP artist was not the only thing that had surprisingly hit his choice for the Tate stop. Four years earlier, he and the performance artist Stuart Brisley had organized what was described in the Studio International Magazine as a “action-happening” in the gallery.
On the evening of March 5, 1968, the French sculptor César was invited to entertain Tate members by doing work with a rapidly drying polyurethane foam. When the sculpture sat down, Sedgley and Brisley crept into the act, ran them off, ran to the front entrance of the gallery, bubbled the pieces on the railings and burned them. They fled before the police arrived.
Until 1972 Sedgley was safe outside the country. Last year he visited Berlin as part of the DAAD artist-in-residence program. The Germans had loved his work: a book called Peter Sedgley: vibrations was published on his arrival. After his scholarship had leaked, he remained. When an exhibition called the Berlin scene in 1972 took place in the London Shortlive Gallery House, Sedgley was recorded as a German artist. Until 1974, the Times newspaper was able to write that it was more right for the expression “I am a Berliner“As John F Kennedy.
All of this had come about despite Sedgley after having no formal training. He was born in London as the son of Violet (born Dickey) and Edward, a railway engineer, and visited the Brixton Technical School (1943-47). After the two -year national service at the Royal Army Ordnance Corps in Egypt, he worked as an architectural assistant in various practices in London. In 1961 he met the painter Bridget Riley, a year younger than him.
Riley had just worked as an op artist and did the first of her monochrome paintings, Kiss this year. This showed almost a curved black mass, but not quite to touch a black plane underneath. Riley recognized her debts to Sedgley’s skills in the technical drawing.
“I didn’t know how to make a curve, also how to use a ruler until I hit Peter,” she said. “I was still working on my kitchen table. He had to teach me geometry so that I could do the things I knew, it should be.”
Under Riley’s influence, Sedgley began to paint. The two would work together in a studio in Riley’s Notting Hill House in the 1960s and taught at the Byam Shaw School of Art.
Sedgley’s paintings of the time were in the round format, which was known as the goals and was made famous by the American painter Jasper Johns. Sedgley’s Red, Blue & Green Target (1964), in acrylic on wood, blinded the eye with interwoven colors. Untitled from the same year was produced with an airbrush, whereby its concentric circles were borrowed a hypnotic blurring. The following year his work and Rileys in the Responsive Eye, the decisive exhibition of the OP art in the Museum of Modern Art, New York, would be recorded.
In 1968 the couple also founded space in St. Katharine Docks in London (Space Commission Artistic Cultural and Educational), based on plans they had seen in 1965 in New York. In the meantime, they converted cheap rental contracts in the region in now empty warehouses. Space is today the oldest organization in London, which has added to his role of international residence and exhibition programs.
In 1971 Sedgley curated a show entitled London Now in Berlin and brought the work of space artists to his new home.
Shortly before he left London, he had introduced his work in a series called Color Cycles with electrical light. The Color Cycle III (1970) is typical in the crop collection that its concentric colors shine when the light of a series of dichroic lamps falls in a 12-minute sequence.
Sedgley continued these experiments in Berlin. The introduction of light had also added movement to his art. Now he worked as a kinetic artist and made mobile sculptures such as the solar -powered colorama (1997) and Spinette (2004), which brakes the light into the rooms in which they hanged.
In London in 1969 Sedgley was one of the founding members of the Group system, which wanted to remove the element of the choice of authority from the work of its members. Fortuna (1994), a steel-glass cell phone, which was named after the goddess of chance, showed this origin by being coupled accidentally.
In half a century, in which he lived in Berlin, Sedgley was admired as a lively artist. In 1997, a one-man retrospective in the Museum of Fine Art in Prague filled the entire building with his work, including Fortuna. In Great Britain, he mostly appeared in historical exhibitions as an artist from another time. His most recent work was occasionally shown in private galleries, but it was the art he had done as a pioneer op artist in London that was most interested. In 2016, his Painting Light Puls No. 3 (1968) was recorded in Electronic Superhighay (2016-1966) in the Whitechapel Gallery. In his 90s he returned to Great Britain and settled in Worthing, Sussex.
In 1951 Sedgley married Marguerite Wiltshire. They had two children, Richard and Laura, and later divorced. In Berlin Sedgley met the photojournalist Ingeborg Lommatzsch. They married in 1996 and died in 2022. Richard died in 1979; Sedgley is survived by Laura and a granddaughter, Kathleen.
• Peter Sedgley, artist, born March 19, 1930; died on March 16, 2025
