Peter Peri was born László Weisz in 1899 in Budapest, Austria-Hungary (now Hungary) to a proletarian Jewish family. In 1919–20 he studied architecture in Budapest and Berlin, establishing himself as a constructivist artist. In 1933 Peri immigrated to England due to his Communist affiliations, where he began experimenting with mouldless concrete as a sculptural medium, receiving several public commissions, most notably, for the Festival of Britain (1951).
Sculptor Peter Peri was born László Weisz on 13 June 1899 in Budapest, Austria-Hungary (now Hungary) to a proletarian Jewish family. Politicised from youth, in 1919 he enrolled at the Hungarian Soviet’s Proletarian Art Workshops. From 1919–20 he studied architecture in Budapest and Berlin, followed by a brief sojourn in Paris and Vienna. In 1921 he created his first abstract geometric reliefs and in 1922 held the first of two joint exhibitions with László Moholy-Nagy at Berlin's progressive Der Sturm Gallery. Peri contributed significantly to the development of Constructivism by challenging the concept of the flat surface, creating irregularly-shaped reliefs and opening new visual planes. In 1924 he exhibited with Nell Walden and the architect Ludwig Hilberseimer, showing Constructivist artworks alongside his new Productivist/architectural works. In 1928, he signed the manifesto and statutes of the Association of Revolutionary Visual Artists of Germany (Asso), calling for a reinvigoration of proletarian culture.
In 1933, Peri immigrated to England after his first wife Mary Macnaghten (granddaughter of social reformer, Charles Booth) was arrested in possession of Communist propaganda. Once settled in London, he explored new materials and approaches to sculpture-making, abandoning his earlier abstract work, experimenting with the use of concrete, and creating figurative pieces without the use of moulds, a significant departure from convention (Stryker 2010, p. 38). Peri joined the Free German League of Culture (FGLC, a politically engaged cultural organisation for German-speaking refugees, founded in Hampstead), befriended anti-Nazi photomontagist John Heartfield and participated in the exhibitions The Social Scene (1934) and Artists against Fascism & War (1935) organised by the left-wing Artists International Association (AIA). In 1936–38 he held four solo shows in London and Cambridge. In 1937 the Cement and Concrete Association commissioned a bas-relief panel for their headquarters, depicting workmen laying concrete. The Association also sponsored Peri's 1938 solo exhibition London Life in Concrete at 36 Soho Square. From 1938 Peri lived in reduced circumstances in his Camden Town studio. It was largely due to Peri that Camden Council built new studios, providing the contact between artists and the community that he urged. In the 1930s Peri abandoned constructivism and embraced his own brand of social realism, which isolated him from other artists, but kept him close to his local community. Margaret Richards noted that 'his neighbours were his material', adding that Peri 'concentrated not on details, but on gestures and postures. A man leans against a lamp-post reading the racing results, or drills a hole in the road […] a girl exuberantly dances. […] Often they are naked, for Peri removed the clothes which label a person's social or economic status in order to show the basic humanity of muscles, sinews and bone structure [...] This is why ordinary people immediately respond to the truth of observation in these figures' (Richards, Tribune, May 1969, p. 19). He became a British citizen in 1939, taking the name Peter Peri. In 1951 Peri produced The Sunbathers for the Festival of Britain. Unlike other sculptures on the South Bank, whose role was secondary to the exhibits and surrounding spectacle, Peri's existed in a symbiotic relationship with its environment, the concrete wall functioning as a platform on which he situated two figures sunbathing. In his postwar concrete works, Peri experimented with wall-mounted sculptures that were often first conceived as maquettes on a horizontal base, before they were enlarged and shifted to the vertical. 'Sunbathers was the apotheosis of this new mode of sculpting: their bodies detached from the wall to an extent conventionally achievable only where figures rest on a horizontal pedestal or platform' (Stryker 2010, p. 38). The sculpture, considered lost until 2016, is now displayed at London's Waterloo. In 1959 Peri made Man of the World (1959) for Devonshire House, University of Exeter and, in 1960, when Coventry's Herbert Art Gallery & Museum opened, a centrepiece was Peri's The Coventry Sculpture; made from expanded metal and concrete, it symbolised the city's concern for art as a means of expression and communication.
Peter Peri was active until the end of his life and died in London on 19 January 1967. After his death, his second wife Heather (they married in 1965) managed to keep his studio open to the public, and friends organised an exhibition to raise money to secure a permanent home for his collection. A joint exhibition, László Moholy-Nagy / Laszlo Peri', was held at the Graphisches Kabinett, Bremen (1987) and a retrospective was held at Leicestershire Museums (1991). In 2018 the Sam Scorer Gallery and Bishop Grosseteste University College in Lincoln, jointly reassessed Peri's work, co-curating an exhibition of sculpture and works on paper. Peri's work is represented in UK collections including Ben Uri Gallery & Museum; British Museum; Leicestershire Education Committee; London Borough of Camden; Henry Moore Institute, Leeds, and Tate Gallery, London. Peri’s grandson is the London-based artist of the same name, Peter Peri (b. 1971).