Peter Tyndall detail A Person Looks At A Work of Art / someone looks at something ...

In his works, Peter Tyndall investigates the act of looking and the relationship between the art object, the viewer and the gallery. He brings our attention to the idea that the process of looking at images is culturally constructed and conditioned by the context of their display, and how this influences the viewer’s perceptions and experience.

Employing humour, structural devices and schematic presentations – including his generic title arrangement and yellow trademark logo that references a hanging picture – Tyndall aims to disrupt our automatic responses and thoughts to encourage alternative ways of perceiving. Primarily a self-taught artist, he studied architecture at RMIT and the University of Melbourne, and has exhibited widely since the early 1970s.

Concerning this self-portrait, Tyndall wrote: ‘The drawing was made while looking into a circular mirror. This was then centred into a larger preparatory design, ringed by the appropriate-to-the-occasion quotation from [British writer] Charles Morgan …’

The work is now in the Michael Buxton Collection, University of Melbourne Art Collection, titled detail A Person Looks At A Work Of Art / someone looks at something … It was in my mind … Charles Morgan CULTURAL CONSUMPTION PRODUCTION.