Michael Petry
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    • Exhibition: In League with Devils
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Exhibition: In League With Devils
Vane
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Gateshead, England
14 November - 7 Dec, 2024

For more information click here:
https://www.vane.org.uk/exhibitions/in-league-with-devils
Parsonage Gallery
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Searsport, Maine
14 July - 1 September, 2024

​Michael Petry’s 2023 exhibition In League with Devils at The Dadian Gallery (Henry Luce III Center for the Arts & Religion, Wesley Theological Seminary Washington DC) travels north and east to Maine and New York this summer. The main body of the exhibition will be seen at the Parsonage Gallery in Maine which will contain several bodies of works, all dealing with historic and current belief systems.

​Artlyst Interview
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For more information click here:

https://parsonagegallery.org/exhibitionschedule/xa3sn9mfpkzrg7480cwkr2f1z8peb2
The Dadian Gallery
Henry Luce III Center for the Arts & Religion, Wesley Theological Seminary Washington DC
May 5 - August 31, 2023


​Petry’s exhibition will contain several bodies of works, all dealing with historic and current belief systems. Petry's Apollo's Mirror (a virtual reality work 6’ in diameter) will be exhibited at VOMA (the Virtual Art Museum) in conjunction with the Dadian show, and available as a digital collectible.
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A hardback publication with the same title accompanies the exhibition.

In League with Devils 
Michael Petry
Published by: MOCA London and The Dadian Gallery
ISBN: 978-1-912800-09-4
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Includes a forward by Stephen Fry (actor/author) and essays by the Director of the Dadian, Aaron Rosen, and independent curators Daniell Cornell and Rick Herron.
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For more information this exhibition click here

Purchase here:
Hatchards
Selected Recent Solo Exhibitions

Apollo's Mirror
Michael Petry

St Mary the Virgin Episcopal Church, 145 West 46th Street, New York

July 19 2024 - Sept 1 2024

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Apollo’s Mirror is a bronze sculpture by Michael Petry patinated and polished to look like ancient Greek originals. A smaller physical version will sit in Wesley’s Oxnam Chapel at the Henry Luce III Center for the Arts and Religion, Washington DC as part of his exhibition “In League with Devils”.
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In collaboration with the Center and VOMA, the world’s first virtual online museum, Petry has created a digital collectible of the mirror for VOMA, This debuts simultaneously with the museum opening.
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​​Running in parallel with In League With Devils at the Parsonage Gallery, Petry will also present a series of bronze mirrors exhibiting at St Mary the Virgin Episcopal Church in New York. In the ancient world only the rich could afford to see themselves, as mirrors were expensive in themselves, and needed daily polishing, usually by enslaved people.

Medusa’s mirror will be shown in Maine and Apollo’s in New York. There, his large mirror will engage in a visual conversation with the Christian iconography as it did in the Wesley Chapel (Washington). Apollo was the Greek god of light and Christ is said to be the light of the world.


www.stmvirgin.org
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Artlyst Interview

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Petry's Apollo's Mirror (a virtual reality work) will be exhibited at VOMA (the Virtual Art Museum) in conjunction with the Dadian show
In League with Devils
Michael Petry

The Dadian Gallery, Henry Luce III Center for the Arts & Religion, Wesley Theological Seminary Washington DC

May 5 - August 31, 2013

Michael Petry celebrates the ceremonial, memorialises the mythical and acknowledges, honours and explores the deeper spirits within us whom we all feel and hear yet have always found hard to name. Our gods and our devils. Stephen Fry

Petry’s exhibition will contain several bodies of works, all dealing with historic and current belief systems. Petry's Apollo's Mirror (a virtual reality work 6’ in diameter) will be exhibited at VOMA (the Virtual Art Museum) in conjunction with the Dadian show, and available as a digital collectible.

A
 hardback publication will also be available (In League with Devils ISBN: 978-1-912800-09-4) which includes a forward by Stephen Fry (actor/author) and essays by the Director of the Dadian, Aaron Rosen, and independent curators Daniell Cornell and Rick Herron.

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Michael Petry: In The Realm of the Gods

A solo exhibition at The Holburne Museum, Bath
October 20, 2017 – April 8, 2018

The Holburne Museum has invited Petry to make a new feature installation and to place two other pieces in relation to existing works in their collection.

​Download the PDF

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The Touch of the Oracle

Palm Springs Art Museum, California
2012
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The Touch of the Oracle features three monumental site-specific installations – Golden Rain, Joshua D’s Wall, and The Dilemma. These artworks provide an opportunity for audiences to experience installation-based conceptual artworks by Michael Petry, who draws inspiration from art history, mythology, and contemporary culture. Each distinct piece relates and interacts with the others and the visitors, creating an environment filled with sound and visual complexity​

Download PDF

​Selected Recent Group Exhibitions
Featured work:
​Libation to Hypnos
Bronze, 31x22x6.5cm
​The Discontents: Part II
Exhibition curated by Zavier Ellis
Charlie Smith London, 6-8 Vestry Street, Floor 1, London N1 7RE
September 13 - October 18, 2025


Petry will be showing 4 new bronze sculptures including Libation to Hypnos. Hypnos was the Greek god of sleep and looked over a liminal world between waking and slumber, thought and dream, light and dark and this new work also moves from state to state as the top piece is simply in balance on the other. Both arches have a light and dark side which can be seen from the side. The work will gently rock if touched. Like the waking of a sleeper - it should be done gently.
For more information click here:
​Press Release

CONFLUENCES
19 July – 13 September 2025
Cross Lane Projects, Cross Lane, Kendal, LA9 5LB


MARK WOODS, JIM WHITING, STELLA WHALLEY, GAVIN TURK, REBECCA SCOTT, LAWSON OYEKAN, MICHAEL PETRY, JULIA MADDISON, LEE HOLDEN, CATHY DE MONCHAUX, HELEN CHADWICK, CEDRIC CHRISTIE, LOUISE BOURGEOIS, JIM BOND, SOOZ BELNAVIS, ATTY BAX, VANYA BALOGH

More info here: www.crosslaneprojects.com

Featured work: Civil War Painting No 7, 2025, acrylic on canvas, 300 x 75 x 3 cm (3 panels each 100 cm long) edit.
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​Cross Lane Projects is delighted to present a group exhibition bringing together 17 contemporary artists. Curated by Rebecca Scott, this new exhibition explores the influences and dialogues between Cross Lane Projects’ co-director Mark Woods and the artists who have crossed his path in his years living in London and Cumbria. Confluences is a development of an idea once floated by an artist who relocated out from London. The idea of artist as tributary was something which resonated to curator Scott: a river branching out into the countryside.

“As life flows on by we pass through certain people’s lives at certain times, we have conversations that formulate thinking, we see exhibitions and meet artists that change and influence us.”
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​This exhibition, traversing painting, sculpture and installation, is both a reflection and a recognition. It draws together artists whose presence, in different ways, has mattered. Some have collaborated with Woods or Scott, some have shaped the direction of their thinking, others have passed through their lives with lasting impact. Confluences is not a group show in the traditional sense, but a gathering. Each work comes from an individual perspective, but all of them carry echoes of shared experience. It is shaped in proximity, in affection, in conflict, and in the long, unspoken understandings that pass between artists who keep orbiting one another.

Michael Petry is included in the group show, WORKOUT.
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25th April - 25th May
The Bottle Factory
12 Ossory Rd, London SE1 5AN


In a world that valorises self-optimization, the gym has become both temple and factory. WORKOUT explores our cultural obsession with the “perfect” body and the machines, rituals, and architectures that promise its attainment.
More info here: https://www.ohshprojects.com/workout
Curated by OHSH Projects



Royal Society of Sculptors Summer Show
​July 22 - September 21 2024
Dora House, London

Selected by David McAlmont

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​It Ain't Over 
Livesey Exchange 2, London

Petry was included in the It Ain't Over exhibition curated by Melissa Jo Smith at the Livesey Exchange 2, London in November 2023. The other artists include L Michelle Baharier, Malathie de Silva, Dirk Larsen, Mark Pearson and Cherrie Stevens. Petry's series of multiple layered images were printed on acrylic and placed on small oak shelves. The series is called:
Can't See The Wood For The Trees​.




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Landscape of the Gods 
29th July - 23rd September
Crosslane Projects Cross Lane, Kendal

Landscape of the Gods, brings together the work of nine artists to explore an interconnection with the landscape, the ceremonial, the mythical, the manmade, the dystopian, the inhabited, and the emotive.
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​Prize image: Michael Petry
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John Powell in the studio
Wexford Culture Night

Petry will be one of six artists making sited sound works as part of Open Gorey's SLEEPERTOWN project on Culture Night. Titled 'The Prize Is Still Mine' the piece, with libretto by Petry and a score composed by John Powell, will be located at the Circe Pavilion in Gorey. Powell is best known for his scores in motion pictures like ‘Solo: A Star Wars Story’ and ‘How to Train Your Dragon’. 

In 2012 Petry, Powell and Gavin Greenaway made a 25th anniversary sound installation at Petry’s solo exhibition ‘The Touch of the Oracle’ at the Palm Springs Art Museum called The Dilemma. Powell has now reworked for Gospel Choir and Orchestra the piece .incorporating the wonderful voices of Judith, Edie and the other singers into something else: and so formed The Prize is Still Mine, a strange mix of styles Powell has always liked; Gospel & early 20th Century Romanticism. Contributing artists include; Judith Hill, José Serebrier, Edie Lehmann, Philharmonia Orchestra, LA Gospel Session Singers

The work features as the opening to Powell’s album Hubris: Vocal Works by John Powell and can be heard here on Spotify
https://open.spotify.com/album/1Y9VtyDGONYhj9rdbTQoVW?highlight=spotify:track:5gOcR1CQVnnuNcpOz1z7h4


Live audiences will be able to experience the work in situ from the 18th of September to March 2021.

Find more information about the artist here:https://www.sleepertown.com/john-powell

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Reclaiming the Body
VOMA


Gallery Zero 
March 2nd - June 2nd 2021


voma.space

The exhibition Reclaiming the Body will examine the way images rooted in Classical European depictions of male dominance have historically contributed to shaping social prejudice against women within our cultural fabric. At the same time, it will present works by contemporary artists who seek to renew and reclaim the female body. 

The exhibition brings together a diverse group of artists, from artists such as Ana Mendieta, Huguette Caland, Adelaide Damoah, Ilona Szalay and Frida Kahlo, whose works express the agency and visceral nature of the female identity, through Trulee Hall, whose video works examine contemporary depictions of womanhood and female sexuality, to Michael Petry and Luciano Garbati, whose works review the historical art canon through the acts of dominance and violence routinely shown towards women.

The Joshua Treenial 2019

Carl Berg & Cecilia Miniucchi // Johan Urban Bergquist // Ryan Campbell // Anibal Catalan // Rachel Dagnall // Jeff Frost //
Séverin Guelpa // Mary Addison Hackett // Samantha Harris & Almond Zigmund // Adriene Jenik & Dominic Miller //
​Mathias Kessler // Angus McCullough // Paloma Menéndez // Michael Petry // Per Platou // Sabine Reckewell // Aili Schmeltz // Lewis deSoto // Benjamin Stanwix // Ivan Wong

www.joshuatreenial.com

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Workflow

CC Sint-Niklaas
21/04/2018 - 02/09/2018

Petry’s installation:
Libation to Virgo (Aphrodite), 2017
silver glazed porcelain stars in the shape of the Virgo constellation.
Each star 13 cm in diameter by 2.5 cm (5” x 1”)
Overall dimensions variable

'WORKFLOW' was conceived as a succession, a panorama of more than 80 mainly contemporary artworks from 49 artists




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​1 st Biënnale Oosterhout, At the Foot of the Gods

Michael Petry’s new installation At the Foot of the Gods has been commissioned for the 1 st Biënnale Oosterhout. His work is made up of over 50 bronze casts of human toes that appear at first to have been broken off of Classical Greek sculptures. Their green (verdigris) colour has the look of ancient sculptures recovered from the sea, yet each one is a cast from someone in the arts or an athlete, as many such sculptures would have been. Each is identifiably unique. Losing the nose, toe, or thumb of a sculpture is one of the most common accidental changes to their appearance. Petry has scattered the bronzes on the stone floor in a Cloister recalling the story of Jason and his quest for the Golden Fleece, where dragon’s teeth became Spartoi (warriors). His work asks: who are the gods, did they make humans, or did we make them?

1 st Biënnale Oosterhout
September 16 - October 22, 2017

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​Frontiers Reimagined

​Official Collateral Event as part of the 56th International Art Exhibition of la Biennale di Venezia, 2015

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Frontiers Reimagined, an official Biennale collateral event at the Palazzo Grimani, aims to "demonstrate the intellectual and aesthetic richness that can emerge in today's globalised art world when artists engage in intercultural dialogue"

Frontiers Reimagined 
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  • News
  • Exhibitions
  • Publications
    • Exhibition: In League with Devils
  • Mirror Mirror
  • Biography
  • Projects
  • Curation
  • Talks
  • Archive
  • Contact