Museum of Installation(MOI)
Physical archive at Tate Britain, Library Archive
Millbank, London, SW1P 4RG

The Museum of lnstallation (MOI) was a unique UK registered Charity (No. 1039544), Co- founded in 1990 by Michael Petry, with the charitable remit dedicated to the research, production and dissemination of Installation Art. MOI positioned itself as the centre of this practice and offered artists from around the world an opportunity to make work in a non commercial setting when few other institutional opportunities were available. ​
Selected Past Solo Exhibitions
Bad Restoration 

​Hiram Butler Gallery, Houston, Texas
2012 

The new glass mirror pieces by Michael Petry are a development from his Artist in Residency last year at Sir John Soane’s Museum, London. Soane used mirrors and glass throughout his home in many ways to evoke different states of mind and feeling. The museum is also undergoing a huge restoration project, as are many such 18th century buildings and many historic paintings. The idea of a continual state of restoration is at the core of Petry’s new works and applies not only to the objects but the self of the viewer in these disrupted mirrors.

​Download PDFa_twist_in_time.pdf
Review
Bad Seed

Sir John Soane's Museum, London, Artist in Residence
2011

See PDF for both exhibitions.

​Bad Seed showed work was based on the difficult personal history of Sir John Soane and his innovative use of coloured glass and mirror in his home. It also referenced the Romantic elements of Soane’s
collections.

The biomorphic glass forms insinuated themselves into odd spaces in the Museum, seeping from corners of rooms, or the fireplace, or appeared as if they had dropped from the ceiling or crept in from outside. Some works were placed
upon items of furniture where their incongruous presence confronted the viewer. The Bad Seeds’ organic shapes ape the vapours said to inhabit haunted sites, the ectoplasm that solidifies into strange artefacts. While they responded to the physical architecture of the rooms they were placed in, they were not site-specific installations, but autonomous sculptures.
Touching the Neoclassical and the Romantic

Sir John Soane's Museum, London, Artist in Residence 2010​
For Touching the Neoclassical and the Romantic Petry exhibited works from his Bare Back Lovers series of glass pieces that fuse neoclassical silver forms with the organic, fluid qualities of molten glass. Soane was interested in neo-classical silver (as evidenced in his collection of Robert Adam drawings for silver designs) as well as glass, which he innovatively used in his architecture.
​
After the introduction of molten glass (a craft technique), each object became a unique sculptural artwork. The works were installed throughout the museum and were placed in such a way to appear as if they were part of Soane’s original collection of diverse objects from across historical periods and of many materials. 
The Network
IVY Restaurant, London 2009
London’s Ivy Restaurant has long been a haunt for artists, actors and authors and has formed a collection of art works that are rotated throughout the owner’s seven other establishments.

The Network is a ceiling installation of 45 large pieces of hand blown glass, some with internal illumination. Each sphere with a light, like a major star at the Ivy, was connected to slightly smaller pieces creating a linked network of glass and black rope. The Network diagrams social interaction; one is linked to others by degrees of separation, and as Hub theory predicts, there will always be those individuals, websites, cells in the body or any other network which will act as bottlenecks and distribution points for information.
​​Kali

​Louisiana Tech University, School of Design 2014
Hiram Butler Gallery 2009
The Kali necklace references the Hindu goddess known as the destroyer or the bringer of death and who is often called the black one. In Hindu creation myths she is the goddess who beheads humans.  In beheading humans she slays their ego thus allowing them to be reincarnated with the hope of a better life and being a better person.

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America the Beautiful
America the Beautiful, Sundaram Tagore Gallery, New York 2007
​Petry’s installation America the Beautiful, fills the Sundaram Tagore Gallery with red, white and blue, interventions, all terribly beautiful.  Made of hand blown glass, sheets of leather (embroidered with real pearls), and hundreds of yards of knotted rope, they snake their way into the retina and beyond. They are proudly beautiful, they boast of their beauty and seductiveness, and to what cause? They investigate themselves, their setting and the new America. They strive to reclaim an America long thought dead, asleep or forgotten where the dignity of all is respected, where beauty is bright and reflects light into dark corners.

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Selected Past Group Exhibitions
Artropocene: iBiennale MMXIX

Michael Petry presented MAP Unit  at Artropocene: iBiennale MMXIX in Honalulu, Hawaii in March 2019.

​Artropocene, the inaugural iBiennale, is an itinerant and island-based art and culture biennial event presenting fifty-eight artists from seventeen countries.

Michael Petry has made a series of MAP units employing a variety of media; glass, canvas and most notably with real freshwater pearls. These works are exactly the artist’s height. The pearl MAP units were strung on silk cord by jewellers to the British Crown with a traditional knot between each pearl. These works can be worn as a performance art piece (called Wearing Michael Petry’s Pearl Necklace) or installed as a measuring unit, being placed directly on the gallery walls or hung from the ceiling. His MAP Units measure the world according to his own dimensions, in his own likeness, as each viewer does the same.

More information
Parallel Lines: Drawing and Sculpture
22 June - 25 August 2019
Michael Petry's work is included in the 'Parallel Lines: Drawing and Sculpture' exhibition curated by Caroline Worthington, Director of the Royal Society of Sculptors. 

The exhibition is an exploration of the relationship between sculpture and drawing, featuring works from The Ingram Collection and  members of the Royal Society of Sculptors. 

For more information visit https://www.thelightbox.org.uk/Blog/parallel-lines-an-interview-with-guest-curator-caroline-worthington

​sculptors.org.uk
ingramcollection.com​

Image: Petry's - Enso for Ayrton, 2019, ink on paper
Postcards From the Edge
Visual Aids Annual Postcard
exhibition and benefit sale of original, postcard-sized works on paper by established and emerging artists.

JANUARY 3–JANUARY 5, 2020
https://visualaids.org/events/detail/22nd-annual-postcards-from-the-edge
​Secret Charter Postcard Auction 2018
Dulwich Picture Gallery
Monday 15th October, 2018

​Secret Charter is a fundraiser with a difference, an original and star-studded art sale to raise much needed funds for the arts at The Charter School North Dulwich.

Petry's postcard is from a recent series of word canvases that feature either the name of the god Eros, the god of love and desire or Apollo, the god of light - the arts and reason for the ancient Greeks. Each canvas is a libation to that god (an offering) and refers to historic offers of things of value (wine, perfume, olive oil) to the gods as well as contemporary offerings to current deities.
​

​Malevolent Eldritch Shrieking

Attercliffe, Sheffield
03/2018
 
Malevolent Eldritch Shrieking is a large diverse international salon-style multigenerational exhibition about painting (in some aspect) including Jan Albers, Sue Arrowsmith, Paul Barlow, Michael Bevilacqua, Juan Bolivar, Kate Bright, Ralf Broeg, John Chilver, Sacha Craddock, Michael Craig-Martin, Hansjoerg Dobliar, Marcel van Eeden, Tim Eitel, Machiko Edmondson, Gail Fitzgerald, Saul Fletcher, Torben Giehler, Lothar Goetz, Brian Griffiths, Terry Haggerty, Jane Harris, Gerard Hemsworth, Gregor Hildebrandt, Dale Holmes, Paul Housley, Tom Howse, Richard Jacobs, Ben Judd, Ben Kaufmann, Scott King, Richard Kirwan, Des Lawrence, Bob Matthews, Peter McDonald, Dawn Mellor, Nathaniel Mellors, Ryan Mosley, and Jost Münster.
0 One-Night Stands: 27 May 2015
with Maciej Urbanek
New Encounters with Contemporary Art

An art one-night stand with Michael Petry.
Third in a series of 10 two-person shows. Maciej will be having them every week for ten weeks in his new space in Leyton/Clapton in East London.

​The Big Egg Hunt

Michael Petry’s Murano glass eggs created at Berengo studios, Venice for:

The Faberge NY Big Egg Hunt (left)

​London's ICA as part of Action for Children's Big Egg Hunt (right)
Four Bits of Scarlet for George the Second

Stephen Lawrence Gallery, Greenwich, London
2008

Four Bits of Scarlet for George the Second was part of a show
Borders and Identities curated by David Waterworth at the Stephen Lawrence Gallery situated in the Old Royal Naval College, which is now the University of Greenwich.

The installation consisted of four sets of two red glass orbs hanging from original lighting lanterns in a line that directs the eye to the centre of the quadrangle where a statue of George II stands. He holds a round orb/globe in his hand representing his rule across the world, which was brought about by his men in scarlet - i.e. soldiers called ‘red coats’. George himself wears the garb of a Roman Emperor, including a leather skirt. His men were also called a ‘bit of scarlet’ in gay parlance, as many offered their services to gentlemen to supplement their meager or non-existent pay. The red glass balls are the same size as the orb in George’s hand, but hang at the height of his testicles. Self Portrait 2008 was placed inside the gallery. Two gold mirrored glass orbs the same size as Petry own testicles were suspended (at their height on his body) from the brass chandelier. When the gallery door was open, this allowed a view of the gold and red glass orbs to be seen together along a perpendicular sight line.